What is Mysticism? An Introduction in Dialogue Form

h/t John Scotus Eriugena

This was originally written as a Theology on Tap Talk to promote my spring course, Mystical Journeys.

Nutritor: Let’s start at the beginning, with the word “mystic” or “mystical.” When you hear something described as “mystical” what does that mean to you? Does anything come to mind? Are there any ideas or images which you associate with the word “mystical.”

Alumnus: I can’t really say I hear the word “mystical” much, Prof. Nutritor, unless it’s when I hear my friends describe their experiences with… certain substances. But I guess I connect the word mystical with a certain spiritual vibe - a sense of something fundamentally profound and mysterious, but a little bit vague, hazy, or misty. An experience of everything being connected in some deep way that is difficult to put into words. So I guess I might say the word “mystical” means to me something like when you are vibing on a higher plane, where everything feels like it’s connected in some larger, but kind of dim and mysterious whole.

Nutritor: That’s actually a pretty good start. Let’s treat that as our first definition:

Definition #1: The mystical is an experience of spiritual reality which includes a sense of the mysterious unity of all things.

Mystics, then, would be people who have or have had this sense or experience, and mysticism would be the study of them and their experiences. There’s something right about that, although there are ways we will eventually push back against parts of it. 

To start out, I want to make a clarification. What the mystics experience, according to our first definition here, is pretty vague: a sense of connectedness and unity, spiritual mystery. But people who have had mystical experiences often describe something much more specific, not just a general vibe or feeling. Sometimes they see visions or images, or are transported somewhere in some sort of journey. Julian of Norwich, a female mystic from the 14th century, for instance, was suffering from plague and saw Christ’s body hanging on a cross, bloody and drying out in the wind. Then she saw the entire earth as if it were the size of a hazelnut. Many mystics speak of some sort of conversation or encounter with God, are present at some scene from the Bible, or go on a journey to paradise or heaven.

Alumnus: What I am getting from you, Prof. Nutritor, is that mystical experiences aren’t necessarily just a general sense of connectedness and spiritual vibes, but usually specifically involve God or religious subjects. And they aren’t always just being kind of blissed out, but can take the form of conversations, visions, and journeys.  So can I try a second definition:

Definition #2: Mysticism concerns people who have had unusual visions and experiences which relate to God and religion.

It makes me think of those books I’ve seen in bookstores, you know, 90 Minutes in Hell or whatever. People who had near death experiences and came back.

Nutritor: Hmm. I’m highly skeptical of those sorts of books, which seem to either be trying to scare people into believing in God, or portray heaven as a kind of super nice resort where people go around saying catchphrases from Hallmark cards. Seems made up, and really convenient for what people want to believe. The real mystics are a lot weirder than that.

And maybe this is a good time to clarify that mysticism isn’t necessarily about bizarre experiences, or experience at all. Some mystics didn’t have any visions or unusual experiences, and many of those who did didn’t think that was the important thing. They were more concerned with thinking about the unity of God and the soul, and guiding people to a place of spiritual maturity where that unity happened to them, which doesn’t require wild visions, heavenly journeys, or any unusual experience at all.

The visions they had and any journeys they took were meant to be memorable illustrations to teach others about the unity between God and their soul, and how to reach this unity. You aren’t supposed to ask God for miracles like levitating (although yes, that happened to some saints) or for extraordinary experiences. To be obsessed with these things, they tell us, is a sign of spiritual immaturity.

But maybe I should give some more examples first. St. Teresa of Avila, a Spanish nun from the 16th century, is one of the most famous Catholic mystics, and her most famous book is called The Interior Castle. She depicts the soul as a castle with lots of rooms, or “mansions” inside. She writes, 

“I thought of the soul as resembling a castle,  formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in  heaven there are many mansions.” 

She uses this metaphor of a building to describe the dignity of the human soul, the challenges we face in making spiritual progress, and she charts a path to the innermost part of the soul, the room or “mansion” where we encounter God most intimately. This was based on a vision she had, but you don’t need to have the vision to take the journey into the “interior castle” of your soul.

Or let’s take St. John of the Cross, another famous Catholic mystic. His writings describe the spiritual life as the loving pursuit of a bride (the human soul) by her bridegroom (Jesus Christ). The book uses the metaphor of the stages of romantic love and its obstacles to illustrate the progress one can make towards union with God. The language gets pretty erotic and intense: 

“Reveal your presence and may the vision of your beauty be my death; for the sickness of love is not cured except by your very presence and image.”

“Our bed is in flower, bound round with linking dens of lions.”

St. John does not claim that the love story of the poem literally happened to him - he is actually paraphrasing a book of the bible, the Song of Songs. Again, the point is less his individual experience and more the universal spiritual quest.

So we’ve arrived at a third definition:

Definition #3: Mysticism describes and illustrates the search for the ultimate union between God and the soul, guiding the reader through the stages of the spiritual life.

Alumnus: This all sounds very pious. Mysticism seems to be all about super-Catholic monks and nuns who are approved by the Church, and who the Church has even named as saints. I bet the Vatican authorities love all this, because it teaches good Catholics how to make spiritual progress. But this seems more boring than an experience of the unity of all things we started with…

Nutritor: Not so fast. It’s true that many mystics have eventually been named Catholic saints. But even these were usually suspected of heresy and had their writings put on the church’s list of Forbidden Books. 

And those are the approved ones! Some of the famous mystics were actually burned alive at the stake by the Church for their edgy views, like Marguerite Porete. Meister Eckhart, my favorite mystic, was condemned by the Church for heresy, and he mostly escaped a similar fate because he died before he could be punished.

The mystics, because they search for a unity between God and the soul, and have a sense of the unity of all things, have often been accused of pantheism, or eliminating any distinction between God and the world. They seem sometimes to say that God and the soul can be identical, which has often made the Church suspicious. Does God’s role as transcendent Creator (or the difference between the persons of the Trinity) disappear in this ultimate unity?

Let me give an example of something the Church really didn’t like in the writings of Meister Eckhart: 

“In my birth all things were born and I was the cause of myself and all things: and if I had so willed it, I would not have been, and all things would not have been. If I were not, God would not be either. I am the cause of God’s being God: if I were not, then God would not be God.”

“A noble man is that only begotten Son of God who the Father has begotten from eternity.”

God depends on me? I am the Son of God? - pretty wild stuff.

The Church also at times has suspected mystics of pointing people away from normal Catholic practices like going to Mass, confession, the Rosary, and doing good works. For if you tell people that the interior life is what matters most, and even suggest that outward works and practices can be obstacles at times, church authorities have worried about where this might lead.

Alumnus: OK, Prof. Nutritor, so now you are saying that mysticism is when people (usually women) put out dangerous ideas of God and the soul/world being identical (pantheism), and leave behind Catholicism’s distinct beliefs and practices. Maybe they should be burned…

Nutritor: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Calm down. I’m not sure who has been whispering into your ear, but they have probably spent too much time online. We can debate whether ideas like Eckhart’s are correct, but the Church was certainly wrong to kill these people, and often seems to have not quite understood what they were trying to say.

And let’s look at this for a moment from the positive side. Mystical theology is a place where women and lay people could do theology in a time when it was usually priests and monks (and sometimes nuns) who did theology. Mystical theology was one of the first places where theology was done in people’s everyday languages, rather than Latin, which ordinary people couldn’t understand.

Mysticism was also a place where people could ask questions of the religious ideas they received, trying to see how it all fit together coherently into a unity, and how it connected with their own soul and their own spiritual experience. In the modern and secular world, where being religious cannot be taken for granted, it is hard to imagine anyone being Christian in a deep way without attempting something like this. This is why the theologian Karl Rahner said that "The Christian of the future will be a mystic—or will not exist." What is a mystic? Perhaps we could offer a fourth definition:

Definition #4: A mystic is any spiritual pilgrim who follows the drive towards interiority and coherence.

Which brings me to another thing I haven’t mentioned: mystical theology was a major place where Jews, Christians, and Muslims found common ground and learned from each other. Catholics aren’t the only mystics around. Kabbalism is a tradition of Jewish mysticsm, and Sufi is a mystical form of Islam. The mystics of different religions were influenced by each other in important ways.

Alumnus: So mysticism is a sort of hippie thing where are religious paths end up being the same? Where we lose what makes us distinctive in a god without names, who is unity and nothing more?

Nutritor: Not quite. The reason why Judaism, Islam, and Christianity share a lot in common in terms of mysticism is in part because they are all religions who worship a God who is one, and who has revealed God’s oneness to human beings. The drive for unity doesn’t come from some hippie liberal sensibility, but from the core principles of the religion. Besides, they all ended to be drawn to quite definite philosophical ideas, rather than vague sameness. They were influenced by followers of Plato known as the Neoplatonists. The Neoplatonists had the idea that all things emerge from the One and return to it, and thought we could ascend to this One by exploring the deepest part of ourselves. Philosophy gave the mystics of different religions common tropes and vocabulary, so that they could enter into conversation. But conversation is not the same as full agreement. The specific ideas of each religion remained extremely important. For instance, it was actually the idea of the Incarnation (God becoming man in Jesus) which led Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart to their most radical conclusions, not some liberal impulse or influence from outside.

Alumnus: OK - but I’m still worried that we’ve lost something important along the way. What about that sense of cosmic connectedness that I mentioned at the beginning, which I heard about from my friends who tried some… substances? Have we lost sight of the world and cosmic unity in the focus on God and the soul? Were the Christians, Jews, and Muslims all so focused on their similarities and differences regarding God and the soul that they lost sight of this part?

Nutritor: Great question. Actually, the usual position the mystics take is that all these forms of unity are the same. The unity by which God is one is the unity which makes me me in the core of my being. And it is this very same unity which holds the world together as a cosmos, and gives it the order and beauty it has. If I look within my soul, I will find, in the words of the mystic Dante, the “love that moves the sun and the other stars.” To study God and the soul is not to move away from a sense of cosmic connection. There is only one unity at the end of the day - within, without, and above us.

But from another angle, the question you ask here is one of the biggest fights within the mystical tradition. What is the role of worldly desires, external actions, and the physical cosmos? Is the road to mystical union and spiritual maturity mainly about detaching our souls from these things, or are earthly loves the engines that drive us to unity? Different mystics give very different answers to this question. This is only one of the big fights mystics get into.

Alumnus: Yes, I’m certainly getting the sense that things are very complicated. We’ve given so many definitions of mysticism that my head is spinning.

Nutritor: That’s because mysticism is a tradition, and a tradition is defined by disagreements and tensions as much as by what people agree on.

But let’s offer one final definition, to unify our souls, before we depart:

Definition #5: Mysticism is the quest for a unity encompassing ultimate spiritual reality, the cosmos, and our our own souls, and it typically unfolds as a spiritual itinerary, or a metaphorical journey which illustrates the stages of progress or “ascent” to this unity.

If you want to know more than this - whether it strikes you as liberating or like dangerous heresy - I recommend taking Prof. Troutner’s course in the Spring, called Mystical Journeys.

There you will be invited on a journey, described by Dante:

“Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right road was wholly lost and gone.”

This state, the mystics think, describes all of us. How can we find our way home? Enroll and find out.