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Religion
종교 탐방
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Religious Experience
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Religious experience is taken here to include such specific experiences as
wonder at the infinity of the cosmos, the sense of awe and mystery in the
presence of the holy, feelings of dependence on a divine power or an unseen
order, the sense of guilt and anxiety accompanying belief in a divine judgment,
and the feeling of peace that follows faith in divine forgiveness. Some thinkers
also point to a religious aspect to the purpose of life and with the destiny of
the individual. In the first sense, religious experience means an encounter with
the divine in a way analogous to encounters with other persons and things in the
world. In the second case, reference is made not to an encounter with a divine
being but rather to the apprehension of a quality of holiness or rightness in
reality or to the fact that all experience can be viewed in relation to the
ground from which it springs. In short, religious experience means both special
experience of the divine or ultimate and the viewing of any experience as
pointing to the divine or ultimate. |
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The first part of this article provides an overview of religious experience
from a philosophical/psychological point of view. In the second part, the
particular category of religious experience known variously as mysticism,
enlightenment, or illumination is examined at some length, from a cross-cultural
historical perspective. (See also RELIGIOUS
AND SPIRITUAL BELIEF, SYSTEMS OF ; RITES
AND CEREMONIES, SACRED ; SACRED
OFFICES AND ORDERS .) |
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"Religious experience" was not widely used as a technical term
prior to the publication of The
Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902) by William James, an eminent U.S.
psychologist and philosopher, but the interpretation of religious concepts and
doctrines in terms of individual experience reaches back at least to
16th-century Spanish mystics and to the age of the Protestant Reformers. A
special emphasis on the importance of experience in religion is found in the
works of such thinkers as Jonathan
Edwards, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, and Rudolf
Otto. Basic to the experiential approach is the belief that it allows for
a firsthand understanding of religion as an actual force in human life, in
contrast with religion taken either as church membership or as belief in
authoritative doctrines. The attempt to interpret such concepts as God, faith,
conversion, sin, salvation, and worship through personal experience and its
expressions opened up a wealth of material for the investigation of religion by
psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and sociologists as well as by
theologians and philosophers. A focus on religious experience is especially
important for Phenomenologists
(thinkers who seek the basic structures of human consciousness) and
Existentialist philosophers. |
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A number of controversial issues have emerged from these studies, involving
not only different conceptions of the nature and structure of religious
experience but also different views of the manner in which it is to be evaluated
and the sort of evaluation possible from the standpoint of a given discipline.
Four such issues are basic: (1) whether religious experience points to special
experiences of the divine or whether any experience may be regarded as religious
by virtue of becoming related to the divine; (2) the kinds of differentia that
can serve to distinguish religion or the religious from both secular life and
other forms of spirituality, such as morality and art; (3) whether religious
experience can be understood and properly evaluated in terms of its origins and
its psychological or sociological conditions or is sui generis, calling
for interpretation in its own terms; and (4) whether religious experience has
cognitive status, involving encounter with a being, beings, or a power
transcending human consciousness, or is merely subjective and composed entirely
of ideas and feelings that have no reference beyond themselves. The last issue,
transposed in accordance with either a Positivist
outlook or some types of Empiricism, which
restrict assertible reality to the realm of sense experience, would be resolved
at once by the claim that the problem cannot be meaningfully discussed, since
key terms, such as "God" and "power," are strictly
meaningless. (see also certainty) |
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Proponents of mysticism, such as Rudolf Otto, Rufus Jones,
and W.T.
Stace, have maintained the validity of immediate experience of the
divine; theologians such as Emil
Brunner have stressed the self-authenticating character of man's
encounter with God; naturalistically oriented psychologists, such as Freud
and J.H. Leuba, have rejected such claims,
explaining religion in psychological and genetic terms as a projection of human
wishes and desires. Philosophers such as William James, Josiah
Royce, William E. Hocking, and Wilbur M. Urban
have represented an idealist tradition in interpreting religion, stressing the
concepts of purpose, value, and meaning as essential for understanding the
nature of God. Naturalist philosophers, of whom John
Dewey was typical, have focussed on the "religious" as a
quality of experience and an attitude toward life that is more expressive of the
human spirit than of any supernatural reality. Theologians Douglas Clyde
Macintosh and Henry N. Wieman sought to build an "empirical theology"
on the basis of religious experience understood as involving a direct perception
of God. Unlike Macintosh, Wieman held that such a perception is sensory in
character. Personalist philosophers, such as Edgar
S. Brightman and Peter Bertocci, have regarded the person as the basic
category for understanding all experience and have interpreted religious
experience as the medium through which God is apprehended as the cosmic person.
Existential thinkers, such as Søren Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel,
and Paul Tillich, have seen God manifested in
experience in the form of a power that overcomes estrangement and enables man to
fulfill himself as an integrated personality. Process
philosophers, such as Alfred
North Whitehead and Charles
Hartshorne, have held that the idea of God emerges in religious
experience but that the nature and reality of God are problems calling for
logical argument and metaphysical interpretation, in which emphasis falls on the
relation between God and the world being realized in a temporal process. Logical
Empiricists, of whom A.J. Ayer
has been typical, have held that religious and theological expressions are
without literal significance, because there is no way in which they can be
either justified or falsified (refuted). On this view, religious experience is
entirely emotive, lacking all cognitive value. Analytic philosophers following
the lead of Ludwig Wittgenstein, an
Austrian-British thinker, approach religious experience through the structure of
religious language, attempting to discover exactly how this language functions
within the community of believers who use it. (see also
Existentialism) |
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Religious experience must be understood against the background of a general
theory of experience as such. Experience as conceived from the standpoint of a
British philosophical tradition stemming from John Locke and David Hume is
essentially the reports of the world received through the senses. Experience, as
a tissue of sensible content, was set in contrast to reason, understood as the
domain of logic and mathematics. The mind was envisaged as a wax tablet on which
the sensible world imprints itself; and the one who experiences is the passive
recipient of what is given. It is possible to distinguish and compare these
sensible items by means of understanding, but the data themselves are available
only through experience--i.e., the sensation of things and reflection
upon thought and mental activities, feelings, and desires. According to this
classical empiricist view, all ideas, beliefs, and theories expressed in
conceptual form are to be traced back to their origin in sense
if they are to be understood and justified. |
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The above view of experience came under criticism from two sides. Immanuel
Kant, an 18th-century German philosopher, who still retained some of the
assumptions of the position he criticized, nevertheless declared that experience
is not identical with passively received sensible material but must be construed
as the joint product of such material and its being grasped by an understanding
that thinks in accordance with certain necessary categories not derived from the
senses. Kant opened the way for a new understanding of the element of
interpretation in all experience, and his successors in the development of
German Idealism, Johann Fichte, Friedrich
Schelling, and G.W.F. Hegel, came to characterize experience as the many-sided
reflection of man's multiple encounters with the world, other men, and himself. |
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A second attack on the classical conception came from U.S. Pragmatist
philosophers, notably Charles Sanders
Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, for whom experience was the medium
for the disclosure of whatever there is to be encountered; it is far richer and
more complex than a passive registry of sensible data. Experience was seen as a
human activity related to the purposes and interests of the one who experiences,
and it was understood as an interpreted product of multiple transactions between
man and the environment. Moreover, stress was placed on the social and funded
character of experience in place of the older conception of experience as a
private content confined to the mind of an individual. On this view, experience
is not confined to its content but includes modes or dimensions that represent
frames of meaning--social, moral, aesthetic, political, religious--through which
whatever is encountered can be interpreted. James went beyond his associates in
developing the broadest theory of experience, known as radical
empiricism, according to which the relations and connections between
items of experience are given along with these items themselves. |
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Critics of the classical view of experience, while not concerned exclusively
with religious experience, saw, nevertheless, that if experience is confined to
the domain of the senses it is then difficult to understand what could be meant
by religious experience if the divine is not regarded as one sensible object
among others. This consideration prompted attempts to understand experience in
broader terms. Cutting across all theories of experience is the basic fact that
experience demands expression in language and symbolic forms. To know what has
been experienced and how it is to be understood requires the ability to identify
things, persons, and events through naming, describing, and interpreting, which
involve appropriate concepts and language. No experience can be the subject of
analysis while it is being had or undergone; communication
and critical inquiry require that experiences be cast into symbolic form that
arrests them for further scrutiny. The various uses of language--political,
scientific, moral, religious, aesthetic, and others--represent so many purposes
through which experience is described and interpreted. |
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Specifically religious experience has been variously identified in the
following ways: the awareness of the holy, which evokes awe and reverence; the
feeling of absolute dependence that reveals man's status as a creature; the
sense of being at one with the divine; the perception of an unseen order or of a
quality of permanent rightness in the cosmic scheme; the direct perception of
God; the encounter with a reality "wholly other"; the sense of a
transforming power as a presence. Sometimes, as in the striking case of the Old
Testament prophets, the experience of God has been seen as a critical judgment
on man and as the disclosure of his separation from the holy. Those who identify
religion as a dimension or aspect of experience point to man's attitude toward
an overarching ideal, to a total reaction to life, to an ultimate concern for
the meaning of one's being, or to a quest for a power that integrates human
personality. In all these cases, it is the fact that the attitudes and concerns
in question are directed to an ultimate object beyond man that justifies their
being called religious. All interpreters are agreed that religious experience
involves what is final in value for man and concerns belief in what is ultimate
in reality. |
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Because of their intimate relation to one another, the religious and the
moral have often been confused. The problem has been intensified by many
attempts--beginning with Kant's treatise on religion (1793)--to interpret
religion as essentially morality
or merely as an incentive for doing one's duty. Religion and morality are,
however, usually taken to be distinguishable; religion concerns the being of a
person, what he is and what he acknowledges as the worshipful reality, while
morality concerns what the person does and the principles governing his relation
to others. While it is generally acknowledged that religion must affect man's
conduct in the world, some have maintained that there is no morality without
religion, while others deny this claim on the ground that morality must remain
autonomous and free of divine sanctions. Religious experience may be
distinguished from the aesthetic
aspect of experience in that the former involves commitment and devotion to the
divine, while the latter is focussed on the appreciation and enjoyment of
qualities, forms, and patterns in themselves, whether as natural objects or
works of art. Anthropological studies have shown that primitive religions gave
birth to many forms of art that, in the course of development, won independence
as secular forms of expression. The problem of the relation between religion and
art is posed in a particularly acute way when reference is made to religious art
as a special form of the aesthetic. Since it is concerned with the holy and the
purpose of human life as a whole, most scholars would hold that religious
experience should be related in an intelligible way to all other experience and
forms of experience. The task of tracing out these relationships belongs to
theology and the philosophy of religion. (see also religious
symbolism) |
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All religious experience can be described in terms of three basic elements:
first, the personal concerns, attitudes, feelings, and ideas of the individual
who has the experience; second, the religious object disclosed in the experience
or the reality to which it is said to refer; third, the social forms that arise
from the fact that the experience in question can be shared. Although the first
two elements can be distinguished for purposes of analysis, they are not
separated within the integral experience itself. Religious experience is always
found in connection with a personal concern and quest for the real self,
oriented toward the power that makes life holy or a ground and a goal of all
existence. A wide variety of individual experiences are thus involved, among
which are attitudes of seriousness and solemnity in the face of the mystery of
human destiny; feelings of awe and of being unclean evoked by the encounter with
the holy; the sense of a power or a person who both loves and judges man; the
experience of being converted or of having the course of life directed toward
the divine; the feeling of relief stemming from the sense of divine forgiveness;
the sense that there is an unseen order or power upon which the value of all
life depends; the sense of being at one with the divine and of abandoning the
egocentric self. (see also personality) |
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In all these situations, the experience is realized in the life of an
individual who at the same time has his attention focussed on an
"other," or divine reality, that is present or encountered. The
determination of the nature of this other poses a problem of interpretation that
requires the use of symbols, analogies, images, and concepts for expressing the
reality that evokes religious experience in an understandable way. Four basic
conceptions of the divine may be distinguished: the divine as an impersonal,
sacred order (Logos, Tao, rta, Asha) governing the universe and man's
destiny; the divine as power that is holy and must be approached with awe,
proper preparation, or ritual cleansing; the divine as all-embracing One, the
ultimate Unity and harmony of all finite realities and the goal of the mystical
quest; and the divine as an individual or self transcending the world and man
and yet standing in relation to both at the same time. (see also sacred and profane) |
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The two most important concepts that have been developed by theologians and
philosophers for the interpretation of the divine are transcendence
and immanence; each is meant to express the
relation between the divine and finite realities. Transcendence means going
beyond a limit or surpassing a boundary; immanence means remaining within or
existing within the confines of a limit. The divine is said to transcend man and
the world when it is viewed as distinct from both and not wholly identical with
either; the divine is said to be immanent when it is viewed as wholly or
partially identical with some reality within the world, such as man or the
cosmic order. The conception of the divine as an impersonal, sacred order
represents the extreme of immanence since that order is regarded as entirely
within the world and not as imposing itself from without. The conception of the
divine as an individual or self represents the extreme of transcendence, since
God is taken as not wholly identical with either the world or any finite reality
within it. Some thinkers have described the divine as wholly transcendent of or
"wholly other" than finite reality, some have maintained the total
immanence of the divine, and still others claim that both concepts can be
applied and therefore that the two characteristics do not exclude each other. |
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Most enduring, historical religious traditions find their roots in the
religious experience and insight of charismatic individuals who have served as
founders; the sharing of their experience among disciples and followers leads to
the establishment of a religious
community. Thus, the social dimension of religion is a primary fact, but
it need not be seen as opposed to religious experience taken as a wholly
individual affair. There has been some difference of opinion on the point;
Whitehead, for example, put emphasis on the "solitariness" of
religious experience precisely in order to deny the claim of those who, like Émile
Durkheim, a French sociologist, characterized religion as essentially a
social fact. The social expression of religious experience results in the
formation of specifically religious groups distinct from such natural groups as
the family, the local society, and the state. Religious communities, including
brotherhoods, mystery cults, synagogues, churches, sects, and monastic and
missionary orders, serve initially to preserve and interpret their traditions or
the body of doctrine, practices, and liturgical forms through which religious
experience comes to be expressed. Such communities play a significant role in
the shaping of religious experience and in determining its meaning for the
individual through the structure of worship and liturgy and the establishment of
a sacred calendar. Communities differ in the extent to which they stress the
importance of individual experience of the divine, as distinct from adherence to
a creed expressing the basic beliefs of the community. The tension between
social and individual factors becomes apparent at times when the individual
experience of the prophet or reformer conflicts with the norm of experience and
interpretation established by the community. Therefore, although the religious
community aims at maintaining its historic faith
as a framework within which to interpret experience of the divine, every such
community must find ways of recognizing both novel experience and fresh insight
resulting from individual reflection and contemplation. |
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Religious experience is always understood by those who have it as pointing
beyond itself to some reality regarded as divine. For the believer, religious
experience discloses something other than itself; this referent is sometimes
described as the "intentional" object that is meant or aimed at by the
experiencing person. Analysis of religious experience, interpretations placed
upon it, and the beliefs to which it gives rise may result in the denial that
there is any such reality to be encountered or that the assertion of it is
justified by the experience in question. This conclusion, however, does not
change the fact that all religious experience, whether that of the mystic who
strives for unity with God or of the naturalist who points to a religious
quality in life, purports to be experience "of" something other than
itself. The question of the cognitive import or the objective validity of
religious experience is one of the most difficult problems encountered in the
philosophy of religion. In confronting the question, it is necessary to
distinguish between various ways of describing the phenomena under consideration
and the critical appraisal of truth claims concerning the reality of the divine
made on the basis of these phenomena. Even if describing and appraising are not
utterly distinct and involve one another, it is generally admitted that the
question of validity cannot be settled on the basis of historical or descriptive
accounts alone. Validity and cognitive import are matters calling for logical,
semantic, epistemological, and metaphysical criteria--of the principles of
rational order and coherence, meaning, knowledge, and reality--and this means
that the appraisal of religious experience is ultimately a philosophical and
theological problem. The anthropologist will seek to identify and describe the
religious experience of primitive peoples as part of a general history and
theory of man; the sociologist will concentrate on
the social expression of religious experience and seek to determine the nature
of specifically religious groupings in relation to other groups--associations
and organizations that constitute a given society; the psychologist
will seek to identify religious experience within the life of the person and
attempt to show its relation to the total structure of the self, its behaviour,
attitudes, and purposes. In all these cases attention is directed to religious
experience as a phenomenon to be described as a factor that performs certain
functions in human life and society. As William Warde Fowler, a British
historian, showed in his classic Religious
Experience of the Roman People (1911), the task of elucidating the role of
religion in Roman society can be accomplished without settling the question of
the validity or cognitive import of the religious feelings, ideas, and beliefs
in question. The empirical investigator, as such, has no special access to the
critical question of the validity of religious experience. (see also
cognition ) |
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The most radical form of the denial that religious experience has cognitive
import is advanced by the Logical Positivists, who hold that all assertions or
forms of expression involving a term such as "God" are meaningless
because there is no way in which they can be verified or falsified. |
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Others who hold that religious utterance based on experience is without
cognitive import regard it either as the expression of emotions or an indication
that the person using religious language has certain feelings that are
associated with religion. Those who follow the lead of Wittgenstein regard
religious utterances as noncognitive but attempt to determine the way in which
religious language is actually used within a circle of believers. Some
psychologists have denied cognitive status to religious experience on the ground
that it represents nothing more than man's projection of his own insecurity in
the face of problems posed by life in the world and therefore has no referent
beyond itself. |
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Among defenders of the validity and cognitive import of religious experience,
it is necessary to distinguish those who take such experience to be an immediate
and self-authenticating encounter with the divine and those who claim that
apprehension of the divine is the result of inference from, or interpretation
of, religious experience. Two forms of immediacy may be distinguished: the revelational
and the mystical (for a detailed treatment of the latter, see below The experience of mysticism
). Christian theologians, such as Emil
Brunner and H.H. Farmer, speak of a
"divine-human encounter," and Martin
Buber, a Jewish religious philosopher, describes religious experience as
an "I Thou" relationship; for all three, religious experience means an
immediate encounter between persons. The second form of the immediate is the
explicitly mystical sort of experience in which the aim is to pass beyond every
form of articulation and to attain unity with the divine. (see also
mysticism) |
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A number of thinkers have insisted on the validity of religious experience
but have denied that it can be understood as wholly immediate and
self-supporting, since it stands in need of analysis and critical
interpretation. Some, like Paul
Tillich, hold that there are certain "boundary experiences,"
such as having an ultimate concern or experiencing the unconditional character
of moral obligation, that become intelligible only when understood as the
presence of the holy in experience. Others, such as H.D.
Lewis and Charles Hartshorne, find the divine ingredient in the
experience of the transcendent and supremely worshipful reality but demand that
this experience be coherently articulated and, in the case of Hartshorne,
supplemented by rational argument for the reality of the divine. Dewey
envisaged a religious quality in experience pointing to God as an ideal that
stands in active and creative tension with the actual course of events. Whitehead
identified the presence of the divine with an apprehension of a "permanent
rightness" in the scheme of things and based the validity of the experience
on the claim that an adequate cosmology requires God as a principle of selection
aiming at the realization of the good in the world process. James
found the justification of religious experience in its consequences for the
life of the individual: valid experience is distinguished by its philosophical
reasonableness and moral helpfulness. Finally, some have sought to combine
experience and interpretation by taking the traditional proofs of God's
existence and pointing to their roots in the experience of perfection, of the
contingency of one's own existence, and of the reality of purpose in human life.
On this view, the arguments for the reality of God are not wholly formal
demonstrations but rather the tracing out of intelligible patterns in
experience. |
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Mystics, prophets, and religious thinkers in many traditions, both East and
West, have been at one in emphasizing the need for various forms of preparation
as a preliminary for gaining religious insight. The basic idea is that ordinary
ways of looking at the world, dictated by the demands of everyday life, stand in
the way of the understanding of religious truth; man must pass beyond these
limitations by the disciplining of his mind and body. Three classic forms of
preparation may be distinguished: first, rational dialectic for training the
mind to reach insight (this explains why many mystical thinkers from the
Pythagoreans to Nicholas of Cusa and Benedict de Spinoza were deeply involved in
mathematics); second, moral preparation aiming at purity of heart, which was
sometimes conjoined with bodily discipline, as in the Indian Yoga exercises;
third, the use of drugs to expand the range of consciousness beyond that
required for ordinary life. It is significant that the great mystics invariably
regarded such preparation as necessary, but not sufficient, for experience. The
self may be prepared, but the vision may not come; being prepared, as it were,
establishes no claim on the divine. The experience described by St.
John of the Cross, a 16th-century Spanish mystic, as "the dark
night of the soul" points precisely to the experience of failure.
The soul in this situation is convinced that God has abandoned it, cast it into
darkness, perhaps forever. Mystics in the Taoist
and Buddhist traditions have often emphasized the
spontaneity of insight and the need to seek it through an "effortless
striving" that combines the need to search with the awareness that the
insight cannot be compelled. Zen
Buddhists are fond of pointing to insights that are already possessed but not
recognized as such until their holder is shaken loose from ordinary patterns of
thought. |
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Religious experience receives its initial, practical expression in the
forming of the cult
that provides an orderly framework for the worship
of the religious object. Worship includes expressions of praise,
acknowledgments of the excellency of the divine, communion in the form of prayer,
and the use of sacraments or visible objects that
signify or represent the invisible sacred beyond them, feelings of joy and of
peace expressed often in musical form, and sacrifice or the offering of gifts to
the divine or in the name of the divine. Worship is ordered by means of liturgy
directing the experience of the worshipper in patterns that combine the written
word, the spoken word, and sacred music in a unity aimed at bringing him or her
into the presence of the divine. (see also
liturgical music) |
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Religious experience has to do with the quality and purpose of life as a
whole and with the ultimate destiny of the person. Certain special times and
events in the course of life present themselves as occasions that are set apart
and celebrated, because they direct man's thought to the divine and the sacred
with peculiar forcefulness. These occasions, called life crises, are regarded as
dangerous because they are transitional from one stage of life to another and
open to view the relation of life as a whole to its sacred ground. Pregnancy and
birth, the naming of a child, being initiated into the community--sometimes
called "puberty rites"--the choice of a vocation, the celebration of
marriage, and the time of death are experienced as special events distinct from
the routine happenings of secular life. These events represent
"crises"--i.e.,
turning points--when man's relation to the sacred becomes a matter of
special concern. As Gerardus van der
Leeuw, a Dutch phenomenologist and historian of religions, points out,
these transitional times are occasions for celebration in every culture because
they mark the death of one stage and the birth of another in a universal cycle
of life. |
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The marking off of these crisis occasions from the routine events of daily
life points to the all-important distinction between the sacred and the secular.
As directed toward the sacred, religious experience finds expression in the
specifically religious form of the cult and in the cycle of sacred life. There
is, however, a secular as well as a sacred life, and, since religious experience
concerns the whole of life, the religious meaning must be related to all the
dimensions of secular life--political, economic, moral, technological, and
other. The relationship is twofold; on the one hand, there is the bearing of the
conception of the divine on standards of behaviour, and, on the other, there is
the influence that the religious meaning has upon one's general attitude toward
life. The sacred, thus, makes its impact on the secular by providing principles
that are to govern the relations between persons and by holding before men a
vision of the divine that gives purpose to life as a whole. Although the sacred
retains its dynamism by becoming related to secular life, there is the constant
danger that it will lose itself in the secular, unless specifically religious
forms of life are preserved. The existence in every society of secret and
mystery cults, of sacred brotherhoods, of groups of disciples devoted to holy
men, of monastic orders, and, on the broadest scale, of established churches and
denominations, points to the need felt to retain the sacred as a special domain
that can neither be merged into nor contained within secular society. |
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In all of the world religions, religious experience receives its most
enduring expression in the form of sacred
scriptures and the body of commentary through which they are
interpreted. Mythological and symbolic forms of expression are older than
conceptual forms and systems of doctrine. Myth
takes the form of a story and represents the imaginative use of materials drawn
from sensible experience in order to express a religious meaning surpassing the
sensible world. Myths of creation in many religions give ample evidence of this
imaginative function. The task of the theologian using conceptual tools is to
elucidate the thought content of the myth and other primary forms of religious
expression--legend, parable, confession, lamentation, prophetic vision--and
thereby reduce the degree of dependence on the sensible and imaginative
elements. It is important to distinguish devotional and liturgical expressions
from the theological use of language. Creeds,
confessions, psalms and hymns of praise, litanies and scriptures containing a
record of the lives and experiences of sacred persons, all give immediate
expression to the primary experience upon which a religious tradition is
founded. Systems of theology
and religious philosophy make their appearance when it becomes necessary to
conceptualize and express consistently the body of belief about the divine, the
world, and man implied in this primary experience. Tension exists between
religious experience and theological expression at two points: first, the
pietistic and evangelical spirit in religion, as seen, for instance, in some
forms of Protestant Christianity, and the bhaktidevotional
movement in Hinduism, seeks to preserve the primacy of experience at the expense
of theology; and, second, those who acknowledge the indispensability of theology
will also demand that its formulations remain in accord with the experience it
is meant to express and interpret. (see also
creation myth, doctrine) |
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The personal character of religious experience makes it essential to
understand its varieties as manifested in different types of personality and the
functions they perform. The mystic, a reflective and contemplative type, shuts
out the world and all distracting influences in order to reach true selfhood
through purification and enlightenment. Although mysticism has social
implications, the mystic is primarily an individualist, whereas the prophet, a
person of intense but intermittent experience, sees himself called to be a
spokesman for the divine to the community or all mankind, and regards his own
experience as a message that enables him to interpret the past and the future in
the light of the divine will. The priest is a mediator between man and the
divine, and his main function is the proper ordering of worship through
liturgical forms. By contrast with the prophet, whose insight is spontaneous,
the priest attains the authority of his office through education and training;
as guardian of the tradition, he must assume administrative responsibilities in
addition to his role as spiritual adviser; thus he is both active and
contemplative. The reformer is a figure who stands within a religious tradition
and seeks to transform or revitalize it in the light of his own experience and
insight. The reforms intended may be moral, intellectual, or ecclesiastical,
depending on the particular genius of the individual. Common to all reformers is
the conviction that some valid and essential feature of traditional faith has
been ignored or distorted and that these deficiencies must be overcome if the
religion is to be purified. It is characteristic of the reformer to be actively
engaged in bringing about the reforms indicated by his renewing experience. The
monk or member of a religious order is in search of a special or sacred place
set apart from secular life within which a religious life can be lived and moral
and religious demands fulfilled to a greater degree than is possible in the
world. Different orders stress different aspects of experience: some emphasize
ascetic practices and self-discipline; others are devoted to the preservation of
learning and the development of theology; still others make missionary zeal
uppermost, and the members are impelled by their own experience to seek to
convert others. The forerunner of the monk, who lives in a community governed by
rule, was the hermit or religious recluse, the type for whom solitary existence,
preferably in deserts and barren places, is necessary for communion with the
divine and self-purification. The saint is a figure venerated by the religious
community as one who embodies perfection in some form. The saint may have been a
martyr, exhibiting perfection in faith; a person possessed of intensified
capacity for experience and communion with the divine; or one who achieves to a
supreme degree the moral and spiritual ideals of the beatific life. The
theologian has the task of expressing the historic faith of a community
concerning the divine (theos) in rational or conceptual form (logos).
The content of his thought, though handed on to him in its essentials by the
tradition, will depend on his own experience and his insight into the special
relevance of that tradition for his time. The theologian both interprets and
reinterprets. The founder, as might be expected, surpasses all others in
importance. The founder's experience forms the basis of his own authority and
the substance of the religion he establishes. The intensity of his experience
and the effect it has upon his personality are decisive factors determining the
response of his initial followers and disciples. There is reason to believe that
the founders of the great religions, such as Moses, Buddha, and Jesus, did not
intend to fill this role; the founding of the religion in each case was the
result of the impact of their personalities and of the profundity of their
experience on those who gathered around them. (J.E.Sm.)
(see also priesthood,
monasticism, Moses,
Buddha, Jesus
Christ) |
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Mysticism, a quest for a hidden truth or wisdom ("the treasure hidden in
the centres of our souls"), in the 20th century is undergoing a renewal of
interest and understanding and even a mood of expectancy similar to that which
had marked its role in previous eras. Such a mood stems in part from the feeling
of alienation that many persons experience in the modern world. Put down as a
religion of the elite, mysticism (or the mystical faculty of perceiving
transcendental reality) is said by many to belong to all men, though few use it.
The British author Aldous
Huxley has stated that "a totally unmystical world would be a world
totally blind and insane," and the Indian poet Rabindranath
Tagore has noted that "Man has a feeling that he is truly
represented in something which exceeds himself." |
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The goal of mysticism is union with the divine or sacred. The path to that
union is usually developed by following four stages: purgation (of bodily
desires), purification (of the will), illumination
(of the mind), and unification (of one's will or being with the divine). If
"the object of man's existence is to be a Man, that is, to re-establish the
harmony which originally belonged between him and the divinized state before the
separation took place which disturbed the equilibrium" (The
Life and Doctrine of Paracelsus), mysticism
will always be a part of the way of return to the source of being, a way of
counteracting the experience of alienation. Mysticism has always held--and
parapsychology also seems to suggest--that the discovery of a nonphysical
element in man's personality is of utmost significance in his quest for
equilibrium in a world of apparent chaos. (see also
purification rite) |
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Mysticism's apparent denial, or self-negating, is part of a psychological
process or strategy that does not really deny the person. In spite of its
lunatic fringe, the maturer forms of mysticism satisfy the claims of
rationality, ecstasy, and righteousness. |
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There is obviously something nonmental, alogical, paradoxical, and
unpredictable about the mystical phenomenon, but it is not, therefore,
irrational or antirational or "religion without thought." Rather, as
Zen (Buddhist intuitive sect) masters say, it is knowledge of the most adequate
kind, only it cannot be expressed in words. If there is a mystery about mystical
experience, it is something it shares with life and consciousness. Mysticism, a
form of living in depth, indicates that man, a meeting ground of various levels
of reality, is more than one-dimensional. Despite the interaction and
correspondence between levels--"What is below is like what is above; what
is above is like what is below" (Tabula Smaragdina, "Emerald
Tablet," a work on alchemy attributed to Hermes Trismegistus)--they are not
to be equated or confused. At once a praxis (technique) and a gnosis (esoteric
knowledge), mysticism consists of a way or discipline. |
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The relationship of the religion of faith to mysticism ("personal
religion raised to the highest power") is ambiguous, a mixture of respect
and misgivings. Though mysticism may be associated with religion, it need not
be. The mystic often represents a type that the religious institution (e.g., church)
does not and cannot produce and does not know what to do with if and when one
appears. As William Ralph Inge, an English
theologian, commented, "institutionalism and mysticism have been uneasy
bedfellows." Although mysticism has been the core of Hinduism and Buddhism,
it has been little more than a minor strand--and, frequently, a disturbing
element -- in Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam. As the 15th- to 16th-century Italian political philosopher Niccolò
Machiavelli had noted of the 13th-century Christian monastic leaders St.
Francis and St. Dominic, they had saved religion but destroyed the church. |
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The founders of religion may have been incipient or advanced mystics, but the
inner compulsions of their experience have proved less amenable to dogmas,
creeds, and institutional restrictions, which are bound to be outward and
majority oriented. There are religions of authority and the religion of the
spirit. Thus, there is a paradox: if the mystic minority is distrusted or
maltreated, religious life loses its sap; on the other hand, these
"peculiar people" do not easily fit into society, with the
requirements of a prescriptive community composed of less sensitive seekers of
safety and religious routine. Though no deeply religious person can be without a
touch of mysticism, and no mystic can be, in the deepest sense, other than
religious, the dialogue between mystics and conventional religionists has been
far from happy. From both sides there is a constant need for restatement and
revaluation, a greater tolerance, a union of free men's worship. Though it
validates religion, mysticism also tends to escape the fetters of organized
religion. |
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Mysticism shares a common world with magic, theurgy (power of persuading the
supernatural), prayer, worship, religion, metaphysics (transcendent levels of
reality), and even science. It may not be always easy to distinguish mysticism
from these but its approach and emphasis are different. Though there is an
element of magic, psychism, and the occult in much of what passes for mysticism,
it is not to be equated with a science of the unseen or with voices and visions.
Powers of the occult (or siddhis) are viewed as real, but they can also
be dangerous and are not of interest to genuine mystics, who have warned against
their likely misuse. (see also occultism) |
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Prayer and worship may form part of mysticism,
but they are viewed as means and not as essence; also, they are usually
continuations of sensory experience, whereas mysticism is a pure unitary
consciousness, or a union with God. As for science,
it is analytic and discursive and expresses its findings in precise and abstract
formulas; mysticism, however, like poetry, depends more on paradoxes and an
unusual use of language. Philosophies may lead to or follow from mysticism, but
they are not the same. Nature
mysticism is another prominent variant, to which poets and artists are
particularly prone. This has often been described or dismissed as pantheism (the
divine in all), though it is perhaps other than a simple assertion of identity. |
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Emotionalism and purified emotion are quite different. Emotionalism, a kind
of unsuccessful ecstasy, may arise from unpurged elements in the being; it could
also be a concession or inability to hold the flow or touch from above. The
natural state of man and, even more, that of the true mystic is serene and not
agitated, not at the mercy of what the medieval mystical book The Cloud of Unknowingcalls
"monkey tricks of the soul." "Be still, and still, and
know." Mysticism, among the many forms of experience, confirms the claims
of religion and is viewed as providing a foretaste of the life after death. |
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To define is to limit, and no single definition will cover every aspect of
mysticism. Some have objected to the word itself and believed that
"enlightenment" or "illumination" might be better. Though
they meet, mysticism has to be distinguished from prophetic religions as well as
from shamanism
(a belief system built around psychic transformations). Working through chosen
individuals--not necessarily saints and chosen for no other reason than God's
will--prophetic religions emphasize action to a far greater extent than most
forms of mysticism, with its penchant for inwardness and the beyond. Though in ecstasy
the barriers seem to disappear, in prophetism God and man are rarely
identified. Shamanism, a technique of ecstasy generally found in Siberia and
Central Asia but with parallels in primitive society, provides a sort of
correspondence with the purgative stage of mysticism (in which physical needs
are negated). The closeness to paranormal (or supernatural) phenomena seems more
pronounced, however, in shamanism. Both the shaman and the mystic, as
communicants with a world beyond normal experience, reveal an identity of goal,
if not of practice and content. |
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Paradigmatic pronouncements in regard to mysticism pose problems of their
own. The classic Indian formula--"that thou art," tat
tvam asi( Chandogya, 6.9)--is
hedged in with the profoundest ambiguity. The difficulty reappears in the
thought of the medieval Christian mystic Meister
Eckehart, who had the church raising questions for such unguarded
statements as "The knower and the known are one. God and I, we are one in
knowledge" and "There is no distinction between us." |
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Mysticism may be defined as the belief in a third kind of knowledge, the
other two being sense knowledge and knowledge by inference.
Adolf Lasson has written: |
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The essence of Mysticism is the assertion of an intuition which transcends
the temporal categories of the understanding. . . . Rationalism cannot conduct
us to the essence of things; we therefore need intellectual vision. |
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This same view was held by the 3rd-century-AD Greek philosopher Plotinus.
But the pattern misses the other dominant quality of mystical experience-- love,
or union through love. The medieval, theistic view of mysticism (as of religious
life) was that it was "a stretching out of the soul into God through the
urge of love, an experimental knowledge of God through unifying love." Its
other name was joy, and the endeavour of the mystic to grasp the divine essence
or ultimate reality helped him to enjoy the blessedness of actual communion with
the highest. This was considered both a science and an art. As a science (i.e.,
intuitive knowledge, or the "science of ultimates"), mysticism is
viewed as being able to help in "the overcoming of creatureliness,"
and also as being able to maintain "the tendency to stress up to an extreme
and exaggerated point the non-rational aspect of religion." (see also
Platonism, intuition) |
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Reality, a kingdom of values, is viewed not as a faceless infinite, an
impersonal something or somewhat. If not an ego, it is a being, and most mystics
would call it God. Mysticism arises when man tries to bring the urge toward a
communion with God--a "Being conceived as the supreme and ultimate
reality," according to the British scholar William Ralph Inge--toward a
higher consciousness and being in relation with the other contents of his mind
and total personality, when he tries to realize the presence of the living God
in the soul and in nature or, more generally, in the attempt to realize (in
thought and feeling) the immanence of the temporal in the eternal. A
19th-century scholar, Otto
Pfleiderer, indicated that religious mysticism is "the immediate
feeling of unity of the self with God; it is nothing, therefore, but the
fundamental feeling of religion, the religious life at its very heart and
centre." Against such exclusive concentration the British writer Richard
Nettleship suggests a corrective element, that of wholeness and symbolism.
"Mysticism is the consciousness that everything that we experience is an
element, and only an element, in fact, i.e.
that in being what it is, it is symbolic of something else." |
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Certain forms of mysticism, however, would seem to strive toward a naked
encounter with the Whole or All, without and beyond symbols. Of this kind of
direct apprehension of the absolute, introvertive mysticism offers examples from
different times and traditions. Instead of looking out, the gaze turns inward,
toward the unchanging, the undifferentiated "One without a second."
The process by which this state is attained is by a blotting out or suppression
of all physical sensations--indeed, of the entire empirical content of
consciousness. Cittavrttinirodha
("the holding or stopping of the mind stuff") was how the
2nd-century-BC Indian mystic Patañjali
described it. The model of introvertive mysticism comes from the Mandukya Upanisad: |
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The Fourth, [aspect of self] say the wise, . . . is not the knowledge of the
senses, nor is it relative knowledge, nor yet inferential knowledge. Beyond the
senses, beyond the understanding, beyond all expression is The Fourth. It is
pure unitary consciousness wherein [all] awareness of the world and of
multiplicity is completely obliterated. It is ineffable peace. It is the supreme
good. It is One without a second. It is the Self. (From The Upanishads, Breath of
the Eternal; trans. by Swami Prabhavananda and Frederick Manchester.) |
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Such undifferentiated unity or union between the individual and the supreme
self is unacceptable to certain traditions and temperaments. The Jewish
philosopher Martin
Buber emphasized an "I-Thou" relationship: "All real
living is meeting," and one Thou cannot become It. But even his own
"unforgettable experience" of union he would explain as
"illusory." With a wider range, a British scholar, R.C.
Zaehner, has tried to establish different kinds, or types, of mysticism:
of isolation, the separation of spirit and matter, eternity from time;
pantheistic, or "pan-enhenic," in which the soul is the universe--all
creaturely existence is one; the theistic, in which the soul feels identified
with God; and the beatific, with its hope of deification when "the
perishable puts on the imperishable." |
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Definitions of mysticism include a bewildering variety, ranging from the
biological through the psychological to the theological. The origin of the word
and certain of its features strongly suggest the possibility that mysticism is
the science of a hidden life. But there is also a growing belief among
20th-century scholars that "the people of the hidden" should not
remain hidden too long and should come out in the open, befitting an era of
"open development" and "open realization." Some 20th-century
scientists, among them physicists, biologists, and paleontologists, have shown a
marked mystical bias. A biologist,
Ludwig von Bertalanffy, has confessed to "peak
experiences" of a great unity and liberation from ego boundary: "In
moments of scientific discovery I have an intuitive insight into a grand
design." He finds no necessary opposition between the rational way of
thinking and intuitive experience culminating in what the mystics have tried to
express. Both have their place and may coexist. Earlier there had been a sharp
dichotomy between scientific and mystical knowledge. The logic of levels may
never be amenable to analysis or intellectual understanding, but that is not to
deny the role of reason. |
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Attitudes toward mysticism since the middle of the 20th century have been
considerably modified by an awareness of subliminal consciousness, extrasensory
perceptions, and, above all, an evolutionary perspective. The Roman Catholic
paleontologist Teilhard
de Chardin asked if in an expanding universe mysticism would not burst
the limits of narrow cults and religious rigidity and move toward an ecumenical
future. In a larger view, mysticism has not so much to be defined as renewed and
redefined. |
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Mystical experience, which is centred in a seeking for unity, admits of wide
variations but falls into recognizable types: mild and extreme, extrovertive and
introvertive, and theistic and nontheistic. Another well-known
typology--corresponding to the faculties of thinking, willing, and
feeling--employs the Indian formula, the respective ways of knowledge ( jñana),
works ( karma), and devotion ( bhakti).
Claims have been made on behalf of each, though maturer mystics have tried to
accord to each its place and also to arrive at a synthesis, as in the Bhagavadgita(Hindu
sacred scripture). Depending on the powers of discrimination, the intellectual
or the contemplative type tries to reach the Highest, the One, or the Godhead
behind God. In its approach toward the supreme identity it tends to be chary of
multiplicity, "to deny the world that it may find reality." Plotinus
was "ashamed of being in the body." In the 17th century, Spinoza's
nondenominational concept of intellectual love of God revealed a sense of
aloofness or isolation reminiscent of the ancient Hindus. (see also
karma-marga) |
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Man, however, does not live by thought alone; to live is to work, and faith
without works is dead. The mystic injunction is that works should be done in a
spirit of nonattachment, with the ego sense (I, the doer) taken away. In a
larger sense, not merely the doing of religious chores but all activity is
offered to the Supreme. All life, according to many mystics, turns into a
sacrament. "All life is yoga
(meditation practice)." |
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For the emotional type of person there is the mysticism of love and devotion.
A theistic attitude, or devotional mysticism, depends upon mutual attraction. In
the words of a Sufi
poet, "I sought Him for thirty years, I thought that it was I who desired
Him, but no, it was He who desired me." The path of devotion includes the
rituals of prayer, worship, and adoration, which--if done with sincerity,
inwardness, and understanding--can bring some of the most rewarding treasures of
the religious life, including ecstasy (or samadhi). There is a paradox
and a danger here: the paradox of avoiding the loss of personality, the danger
of self-indulgence. |
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Also, in an unpurified medium, the experiences may and do give rise to erotic
feelings, a fact observed and duly warned against by the wiser spirits and the
Fathers of the Church. (Zen Buddhism avoids both the overly personal and erotic
suggestions.) Sometimes the distinction between eros (Greek: "erotic
love") or kama (Sanskrit: "sexual love") and agape (Greek:
"a higher love") or prema (Sanskrit: "higher love")
can be thin. In the Indian tradition the Vaisnava
(devotional) and Tantric
(sexual) experiments were, in their apparently different ways, bold and honest
attempts at sublimation, though the majority of these experiments turned out to
be failures and disasters. (see also
eroticism) |
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The same fate is likely to overtake the craze for psychedelic drugs
and pharmacological aids to visionary experience--practices that are by no
means new. A yogic writer, Patañjali, speaks
of the use of ausadhi (a medicinal herb) as a means to yogic experience,
and the Vedas (Hindu scriptures) and Tantras (Hindu occultic writings)
refer to wine as part of worship and the initiatory rites. The Greek Mysteries
(religions of salvation) sometimes used sedatives and stimulants.
Primarily meant to remove ethical, social, and mental inhibitions and to open up
the subconscious no less than the subliminal, these techniques, as a rule, were
frowned upon, even though those who took the help of such artificial aids had
undergone prior training and discipline. (see also
Yoga) |
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A whole new life-style and vocabulary have developed around medicinal
mysticism in the 20th century. Peyote, mescaline, hashish, marijuana, Cannabis
indica, LSD, and other similar products have become familiar to much of the
world's population. The visions induced by such aids at best resemble the
extrovertive type and cannot be easily equated with genuine mystical experience.
According to taste, temperament, and tradition, the experience--a parody of
creative spontaneity--may come from unexpected sources. In any case, utilizing
such medicinal aids rarely achieves union with Self or God, and no permanent
change of personality (in the mystical sense) has been known to occur. |
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The goal of mysticism is "ghostly," a state or condition in which
the soul is "one'd with God," according to the Western medieval work The Cloud of Unknowing. This
"one-ing" is because all men, according to mystics, are called to
their origin. Self-realization is basically one in intent with the injunctions
of the Greek Mysteries: "Know thyself." This knowing, union, or
communion with the divine and the sacred is of the essence of the ascent of man.
As the only answer to the problem of identity, mystics look upon it as the final
end, the summum bonum. At the journey's end waits the knowledge by
identity. The direct, intuitive perception is more akin to revealed religion
than to science and philosophy, though it is of itself a science, and
philosophies spring from as well as lead to it. |
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In the movement toward the goal there are, naturally, stages and processes,
marked differently in different traditions. The discipline of prayer,
purification, and contemplation culminates in the highest wordless union with
the divine and the ultimate. As the process unfolds itself along the mystic way,
an alteration of personality--a conversion, if not reintegration--occurs. The
unregenerate "old man" (in Christianity) is replaced by the new being.
The "twice born" (in Hinduism) becomes more than a metaphor or
sacrosanct social arrangement. There is a change of level and mind. One of the
aims or methods of mysticism is to make possible this change and conversion, a
shift from the profane to the sacred, from "here" to
"there": "Lead me from the unreal to the real, from darkness to
light, from death to immortality" (Brhadaranyaka
Upanisad). Before the transition, or the "great passage," is
completed, however, the individual or pilgrim feels successively or
simultaneously his oneness with nature, with people, and with things--an
extension of awareness or expanded selfhood to which no limits can be assigned.
Cosmic consciousness is thus a stage in a progressive self-discovery. |
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The nature of the goal, however, introduces a paradox. Like every other aim
and activity, mysticism operates in a historical context. Yet, sooner or later,
it also tends to reveal a timeless stance. The mystic is both in and out of time.
The eternal now is a kind of release from the temporal order. Such a release may
lead to a shift from the local to the universal, to a growing sense of unity of
all experience. Though not a declared or conscious aim, this result could be
looked upon as a not unworthy goal as well as a pragmatic standard. |
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To cure man of a provincialism of the spirit, from which more people suffer
than either know or admit it, is one of the goals of a mysticism that has come
of age. The true mystic is a cosmopolitan. In man's many-sided growth toward the
real, a sane and mature mysticism leads to an ecumenical insight and obligation.
Local colour, particulars, and uniqueness will not cease, but, in the
perspective of the future and of wholeness, the universal alone will have
survival value. |
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The apotheosized (divinized) field of consciousness is mysticism's ultimate
goal and gift to the life of an evolving humanity. It alone is fitted to mediate
between the anguish of existence and the serenity of essence, between samsara
("cycle of birth and rebirth") and Nirvana (the State of
Bliss). According to an American Roman Catholic mystic, Thomas Merton,
"The spiritual anguish of man has no cure but mysticism." |
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Though the mystic goal may seem to be tied to a transcendent reality, this
does not mean a sundering of all relations and responsibilities. On the
contrary, it is the guarantee of a set of altered relationships and a
rehabilitation of what may be called the higher reason. Intuitions that sink
into private fancy and morbidity have a short life to live. As for the mystic's
"yonder," it is not spatially or posthumously remote but rather refers
to a different order of reality and consciousness. The healthier forms of
mysticism do not abjure action or the claims of love. It is an ancient maxim
that one becomes what one loves. This is how the psychic birth repeats itself in
the mystic soul, as stated, for example, by Meister
Eckehart, a medieval German mystic: "It is more worthy of God that
he should be born spiritually of every virgin, or of every good soul, than that
he should have been born physically of Mary." |
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The mystic is not always amorous of the beyond, leaving an unredeemed world
to its own ways. Not escape but, rather, victory is mysticism's inner urge and
promise. The more sober among the mystics do not merely withdraw; they also
return to the base and attempt the ancient alchemy, the transformation of men. A
solitary salvation does not satisfy either head or heart. |
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Within man is the soul of the holy, said Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th
century. This is true of society, too. As the French sociologist Émile
Durkheim saw it, the sacred is but a personified society. Mysticism, one
might say, is the art and science of the holy. Theologically, it is but
"the experience of the Holy Ghost, . . . the realization of the Spirit of
Holiness." As the opposite of the profane and as a distinct and irreducible
quality of the religious and mystical life, the sacred has always existed. It is
indeed a mark of the real, and, when the German theologian Rudolf
Otto isolated the sacred as a "quite distinctive category" of
mystical apprehension, he had no lack of evidence. The emphasis, however, was
not unanimously accepted. Some, like Inge, thought
the sacred might as well be elicited from such ultimate values as "truth,
goodness, and beauty." |
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According to the respective world view, the interpretation or emphasis
varies, but the universal core remains unaffected. The sacred is in its own way
a coherent system, though not rational. The dualists no less than the theists
insist on the unqualified and irreducible "otherness," the
unbridgeable gulf, even when one speaks of union or communion. It is the
distance that preserves the sacred. |
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Christian mystics, who often speak of "union with God," generally
do not imply identity with the divine, since this might lead to heresy. The
16th-century Spanish mystic St.
Teresa of Avila could write with impunity: "It is plain enough what
unity is--two distinct things becoming one." But most others could not be
so plain and had to use special strategy to cover up traces of possible
deviation from what was permissible. Even if there had been a semblance of
interpenetration between man and the divine, there could be no substantial
identity. "Each of these," wrote the medieval Dutch mystic Jan
van Ruysbroeck, "keeps its own nature. There is here a great
distinction, for the creature never becomes God, nor does God ever become the
creature." The same doctrine is preached in the Middle Ages by the mystic Heinrich
Suso: |
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In this merging of itself in God the spirit passes away and yet not wholly;
for it receives indeed some attribute of God, but it does not become God by
nature. It is still something that has been created out of nothing, and
continues to be this everlastingly. |
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Identification of man with the divine, according to many the heart of
mysticism, raises problems from other points of view as well. Pantheism,
which asserts that all is God (or Nature), and God (or Nature) is all, is looked
upon as a false doctrine in many religions. To John Calvin's leading
question--"The Devil also must be God, substantially?"--the
unsuspecting Spanish theologian and physician Michael Servetus had answered
smilingly: "Do you doubt it?" The opinion cost him his life. The
Hindus' Upanisads, however, insist on this identity in passage after
passage. Closely looked at, this may not be simple pantheism but an identity in
difference, a paradox present in even Vedanta (a Hindu monistic system).
Islam has been fiercely critical of these claims of oneness and the
medieval mystic al-Hallaj
had to pay with his life (922) for making the unorthodox announcement of his
identity with the divine: "Ana
al-haqq" ("I am the Truth"). He was not the only one
to speak in this manner. The more moderate Mahmud
Shabestari had reported an experience (c. 1320): |
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In God there is no duality. In that presence "I" and "we"
and "you" do not exist. "I" and "you" and
"we" and "He" become one. Since in the unity there is no
distinction, the Quest and the Way and the Seeker become one. |
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But Muslim theologians as a rule tended to dismiss those who "boasted of
union with the Deity" as merely "babblers." In the Jewish
tradition, it is generally considered improper and indecorous for any man to
give a personal account of his own mystical experience. (see also Judaism) |
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Behind these and other interpretations, the reality of the sacred--and its
persistent ambiguity--appears to be too true to be denied or ignored. Awe may or
may not be the best part of man, but without it a necessary dimension is left
out of the image of man, the dimension of what Otto called the mysterium
tremendum et fascinans("the mystery that repels and
attracts"). The mystics are loath to leave this dimension out and, directly
or indirectly, insist on its inclusion. The reason was suggested in the 5th-4th
centuries BC by the Greek philosopher Plato, who
maintained that the divine was the head and root of man. The mystic's is the
eye, the third eye, with which the world beholds itself and knows itself divine.
Though the vision is partial and passes away, there could be an ideal state of
unbroken awareness of the Real Presence, an epiphany (manifestation). |
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According to the mystical point of view, the rational content of religion is
not enough; it is not of the essence of religion. The sense of the holy, the
mark of man's encounter with the "other," is usually invested with an
ethical aura or undertone. This is how most people understand it. But this
lowers its potency considerably. There is clearly an overplus, below good and
evil and beyond good and evil. The numinous
(spiritual) is not altogether free of the ominous. Thus, though the holy may be
discussed, it cannot be well defined. It can, however, be experienced and
evoked, as part of that wordless mystery that man must face--even if he is not
able to explain satisfactorily--in his journey toward the real. This may happen
early or late in his mystical journey, and the notion of evolution may not be
applied to it uniformly. |
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The holy is not always and altogether a pleasant experience. Often shrouded
in a fear that is more than fear, it is an inward dread and shuddering. The holy
as awe-inspiring can be found in the Indian pantheon in such figures as Rudra
and Kali, the dark and wrathful faces of the divine, in which--in
a collapse of finitude--majesty and unapproachability are inexplicably blended.
The feeling of being consumed in the presence of the divine is a profound
expression of man's relation to the holy. As for the ultimate mystical identity
with the Supreme, Self, God, or the Unknowable, that also confirms the
nonrational and suprarational nature of the experience in which ego, logic, and
grammar are shattered alike. A frightful and traumatic adventure, not unlike the
Greek Mystery rites, it can erupt at every crisis, break through an insulated
universe. A clergyman cited by William Starbuck, an American psychologist of
religion, spoke of having experienced |
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a [silent] presence [in the night], all the more felt because it was not
seen. I could not any more have doubted that He
was there than that I was. Indeed, I felt myself to be, if possible, the less
real of the two. |
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Diminution apart, the holy generally gives rise to a sense of energy and
urgency, which may take different forms. At a higher level, the consuming fire
of love reported by mystics could be an extension or refinement of the same
energy, for "Love is nothing else than quenched Wrath." The
"nothing else" may be an exaggeration, but such paradoxes of the
religious life--e.g.,
the unity of opposites--meet man at every turn. The void in Buddhism, like
the nothing in Western mysticism, may be a numinous ideogram of the "wholly
other." |
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As means to meet the divine, some mystics have taken recourse to fasting,
breath control, meditation, ecstasy,
simplification, autosuggestion, and monoideism (absorption in a single idea). Rituals,
in some cases, provide contact. An old method is the via
negativa ("negative way"): "the emptier your mind, the more
susceptible are you to the working of the presence." In other words, the
impediments have to be removed. Among other indirect--but no less
effective--means would be the shock therapy of the blood-curdling images that
one notes in Tibetan iconography and symbology, which have their links with the
archaic and the chthonian (infernal). On more negotiable levels, works of
art--as far apart as Sung (Chinese) paintings, Gothic cathedrals, medieval
temple architecture in India, the Egyptian Sphinx, music such as the Missa
Solemnis or Sanskrit (Hindu) hymns--are accredited conductors of the
numinous. Darkness, solitude, silence, and emptiness are sometimes enough for
the sensitive soul, and the doors of perception open to a wider world beyond. A
wide stretch of land or cranes flying against a cloudy sky were enough to throw
the 19th-century Indian saint Ramakrishna into transport. But, always, it is
less the object than something seen through the object, a bodiless presence,
that forms the essence. Without symbols in which the holy is embodied, the
experience of the holy vanishes. (see also
religious symbolism) |
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Though it creates a sense of awe and exaltation, the idea of the holy also
produces a mood of dependence, leading to action aimed at appeasing the deity or
the powers behind the universe. At first, the policy of appeasement may have
been inspired by fear and hope of reward. But, since the deity is not ultimately
malevolent, it could also evolve into an idea of grace.
Mystical theology, both in the East and in the West, has sometimes been divided
over the issue whether the union with the divine is the result of one's unaided
effort or supernatural grace. |
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The approaches to the divine or sacred are various rather than uniform.
Moving through physical, intellectual, devotional, and symbolic rituals and
disciplines, it moves toward the ultimate goal: the annihilation of the self, unio
mystica ("mystical union") in Western Christianity, moksa
("salvation") in Hinduism, Nirvana (the State of Bliss) in Buddhism,
and fana` ("the snuffing out of self") in Islam. Though
the words differ, the experiences are perhaps allied, if not the same. In a Sufi
(Islamic mystical) poem the divine voice speaks exultantly: (see also
Sufism) |
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Annihilate yourself gloriously and joyously in Me, and in Me you shall find
yourself; so long as you do not realize your nothingness, you will never reach
the heights of immortality. |
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The description could as well be applied to the Buddhist shunyata ("void")
and the self-negating of the Christian mystics. |
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The ultimate has been, as a rule, thought of as something "other"
and apart, even if in mysticism what is sought is union or unity. Hierophany
(manifestation of the holy) implies a choice and a distinction: between that
which manifests the sacred and that which does not. Also, though a hierophany
may represent a historic event that does not minimize its larger validity (and
in any culture there may be local as well as general hierophanies), a hierarchy
is not unlikely. On occasions, the sacred may manifest itself in something
profane. Ideally, to a mystic, "the integrated quality of the cosmos is
itself a hierophany." From this follows the possibility of consecrating the
whole of life, so that by sacramental transformation, at any moment, "the
flash of a trembling glance" may be inserted into the great time and
project the man amphibian (having dual life) into eternity. Deification,
without doubt one of the goals of the mystical life and a fundamental concept of
orthodox Christendom, is part of the dialectics of the sacred. The alchemic
undertone, in the man-God idea, has never wholly been extinguished. But, as part
of the continuing paradox, one should also mention a resistance to the sacred.
Depending on the ambivalence of the response to the sacred, which at once repels
and attracts, the resistance is ultimately a flight from reality. |
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Mystical experience is flanked with a communication hazard, a "polar
identity." The linguistic liberties and extravagances are part of the
logical impossibility of having to describe one order of experience in terms of
another. Hence, the rhetoric of mysticism is largely one of symbols and
paradoxes. The most striking of the strategies, as the medieval Christian
scholar Nicholas of Cusa put it, is coincidentia oppositorum ("union
of opposites"). Since the opposites coincide without ceasing to be
themselves, this also becomes an acceptable definition of God, or the nature of
the Ground. God, said Heracleitus, is day and night, summer and winter, war and
peace, and satiety and hunger--all opposites. A 5th- to 6th-century-AD Christian
mystical writer called
Dionysius the Areopagite
advised people to |
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strip off all questions in order that we may attain a naked knowledge of that
Unknowing and that we may begin to see the superessential Darkness which is
hidden by the light that is in existent things. |
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This use of language or view of things is obviously not normal. |
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Old myths and archetypes are full of examples of such dichotomy. The
Zoroastrian tradition has Ormazd (the Good Lord) and Ahriman (the Lie); the
Gnostic myth speaks of Christ and Satan as brothers; and the same idea is found
in the Vedas, where the suras
("good spirits") and asuras ("bad spirits") are
shown to be cousins. In a different context there is the androgyne
("man-woman"), the ardhanarishvara
in Indian myth. As for the Hindu jivanmukta,
the liberated individual, he is liberated from duality. This is also part of
what the Lord Krsna (Krishna) said, when he asked the hero Arjuna to rise
above the three gunas ("modes"). The Tantras refer to the union
of Shiva (a Hindu god) and Shakti (Shiva's consort) in
one's own body and consciousness and provide appropriate practices to this end.
The Chinese had their Yang and Yin (opposites), the Tibetans their Yab and Yum
(opposites), and Buddhism its samsara and Nirvana as
aspects of the Same. In Prajñaparamita, a Mahayana
(northern Buddhist) text, the Illumined Ones are supposed to engage in a
laughter in which all distinctions cease to exist. |
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Mystical experience permits complementary and apparently contradictory
methods of expression: via affirmativa ("affirmative way," or
fullness) as well as via
negativa("negative way," or emptiness). For fullness and
freedom both are needed. This is because the reality affirmed contains its own
opposite. In fact, the apparent negations--neti-neti,
("not this, not that") of the Upanisads,
the shunyata ("void") of the Buddhists, or the Darkness
beyond Light of Dionysius--perform a double function. They state a condition of
being as well as its utter freedom from every determination. As Dionysius
explains it, "While God possesses all the attributes of the universe, being
the universal Cause, yet in a stricter sense He does not possess them, since He
transcends them all." The "negative way," a way of turning the
back upon the finite, is part of an old, positive, verified insight, at once the
last freedom and, as far as many men are concerned, perhaps a lost freedom. |
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Experiences relating to these realities could not at any time have been
common or widespread and must have come mainly through consecrated channels:
yogis (Hindu meditation practitioners), gurus (Hindu teachers), prophets,
mystics, saints, and spiritual masters of the inner life. This channelling
through human agents has given rise to a host of divine messengers: a hierarchy
of angels, intermediaries, and incarnations, singly or in succession. This
manner of approaching or receiving the divine or holy is the justification of
avatars (incarnations of God) and the man-God in various religions. "God
was made man in order that man might be made God." |
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The mystical experience is a renovation of life at its root; that is, of the
forgotten language of symbols and symbolism. The mystic participates in two
worlds at once, the profane and the sacred. Rituals and ceremonies become the
means of integration with a higher reality and consciousness. But symbols cannot
be deliberately manufactured, nor do they make an arbitrary system. "Being
for ever communicating its essence" is the source of their abundance,
potency, and unity. Even a nontheistic mysticism, such as Buddhism, has deployed
symbols freely, of which perhaps the most well-known is the formula om
mani padme hum ("the jewel in the lotus"). |
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Symbols point beyond themselves, participate in that to which they point,
open up levels of reality that are otherwise closed to man, unlock dimensions
and elements of the soul that correspond to reality and cannot be produced
intentionally or invented. Symbols may be inner or outer. To some, nature
symbolism comes easily. |
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A far more risky but inescapable mode of symbolism than pantheism has been
the use of the analogy of human love and marriage. Not all the mystics have been
deniers or champions of repression. The soul, it
may be added, is always feminine. The Christian mystics St.
Bernard and St. John of the
Cross, the Islamic Sufi poets, and the Hindu
Dravidian and Vaisnava saints could teach lovers. Not only the church but
the faithful are viewed to be among Christ's brides and speak the language of
love. "O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth!" The
speaker is the bride, thirsting for God. St. Bernard has shown that through
carnal, mercenary, filial, and nuptial love the life of man moves toward the
mystery of grace and union. (see also divine union) |
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The hermeneutics (critical interpretation) of "the Bridegroom-Word"
is that "the soul's return is her conversion to the Word, to be reformed
through Him and to be conformed to Him." In the West, the roots of the
tradition go back to the Song of Solomon in the Bible, not, perhaps, the best of
models. The Hindu lilas
("love plays") of Radha and Krsna have been
freely misunderstood in spite of the repeated disclaimer that the events
described are not facts but symbols. The charge of immorality has been loudest
against the Tantras, which had made a subtle, bold, and strict experiment in
sublimation, whose inner sense may fail to be intelligible even to those who are
attracted by it. That the marriage symbol should find a readier response among
the brides of Christ is only to be expected. In The
Interior CastleSt. Teresa has been fairly outspoken: "He has
bound Himself to her as firmly as two human beings are joined in wedlock and
will never separate Himself from her." But this was not a monopoly of nuns.
The medieval theologian Richard of
Saint-Victor has described as well as explained the "steep stairway
of love" made up of betrothal, marriage, wedlock, and fruitfulness. In a
slightly different set of symbols, St. John of the Cross states that after the
soul has driven away from itself all that is contrary to the divine will, it is
"transformed in God by love." |
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Another prominent mystical symbol is the way, quest, or pilgrimage. Having
lost the paradise of his soul, man, as the 16th-century physician and alchemist Paracelsus
says, is a wanderer ever. A Christian monk, St. Bonaventure, has written about
the mind's journey to God, and an English mystic, Walter
Hilton, has described the Christian journey thus: |
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Right as a true pilgrim going to Jerusalem, leaveth behind him his house and
land, wife and child, and maketh himself poor and bare from all that he hath,
that he may go lightly without letting: right so, if thou wilt be a ghostly
pilgrim, thou shalt make thyself naked from all that thou wouldst be at
Jerusalem, and at none other place but there. (From The
Ladder of Perfection) |
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According to the Sufis, the pilgrim is the perceptive or
intuitional sense of man. Aided by attraction, devotion, and elevation, the
journey leads, by way of many a wine shop (divine love), to the tavern
(illumination), "the journey to God in God." In his Conference
of the Birds, the 12th-century Persian Sufi
'Attar refers to the seven valleys en route to the king's hidden palace:
the valleys of quest, love, knowledge, detachment, unity, amazement, and,
finally, annihilation. Others have gone further and spoken of "annihilation
of annihilation." In the symbolic universe, denudation may be viewed as a
way of fullness. (see also
'Attar, Farid od-Din Mohammad ebn
Ebrahim) |
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Men are called to the journey inward or upw | | | |
