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A Paper IX

Definition of 'mysticism'

I said I would attempt a definition of the word "mystic" and its cognates. That I am doing so does not in any way change my opinion that we should stop using these words. But if, God forbid, I were forced to define the words mystic, mystical and mysticism, mystic would simply be someone who has committed to re-centering their life in the deep mind, no matter what the cost; mystical would refer to beholding, when self-consciousness is effaced, and effects irrupt within beholding from the deep mind—which definition would exclude all interpretation, experience and phenomena, such as visions; and mysticism would refer to the effort, process and effects of living the absolute primacy of re-centering in the deep mind so that one's daily life is informed by continual beholding. To return to my earlier definition: mysticism is living the ordinary through transfigured perception.

I will now sum up so that we have of time for discussion.

One of the criteria for testing the reading of a text is how much fiddling and adjustment the reader has to do. If the text simply leaps off the page by itself without requiring a lot of mental gymnastics, then the reading is more likely correct than not. I have applied the model I have described in this paper to a number of disparate texts, from the Pre-socratics such as Empedocles and Heraclitus, through some of the so-called Neo-platonists, the bible, patristic and medieval texts. Where possible I have gone back to the original languages and have consulted experts when the original languages have been too difficult for me.

I am convinced that we have mis-read most of the texts in what is called the Western canon by applying a post-Cartesian method, which is confined to the merely linear, to texts that were written with two ways of knowing in mind. It isn't simply a matter of mistranslation, as I have already discussed; it's rather that all of our interpretations are called into question by this disparity between method and content.

The bad news, then, is that we need to go back and re-translate and re-interpret all of these texts through the lens of the two aspects of knowing. We need to be excruciatingly careful about the language we choose in discussion and translation. We need to revise our opinions about Plato and Aristotle; and about many of the texts we have dismissed as "gnostic". We need to revise our opinions about medieval writers. We need to look again at the way we talk about and classify different kinds of texts.

But there is good news, too. This work will keep humanities scholars busy for at least another hundred years.

Thank you.

A Paper VIII

Classifying Texts

Now I would like to say a word about the way we might classify texts according to what I have said so far. For example, if you look at the group of texts that are commonly referred to as "The English Mystics" you will see that there are all sorts of texts included, some of which have little resemblance to the others. There are didactic texts, such as the Ancrene Wisse; there are abstract texts, such as Walter Hilton's; there are devotional texts such as Richard Rolle's; there are anagogic texts such as Julian of Norwich's Long Text and The Cloud of Unknowing. The devotional category is probably the biggest, and the anagogic category the smallest. The former includes everything from devotional manuals to visionary texts to Rolle's trance-inducing canor, and the latter is limited to those texts that lead the reader into infinite openness and invites him or her to remain there without filling up the space with a lot of devotional kitsch. All of the groups except the anagogic are firmly products of the self-conscious mind and reflect the reader back on him or her self. Only the anagogic texts lead into the liminal. Of course there might be phrases or tropes in any of these texts that act as triggers that propel the reader into the liminal, and it is to them that we now turn.

Poetics: A Short list of Tropes

I mentioned in the beginning the importance of reading literarily instead of literally, and the need to read many texts as poetry even if they are set out as prose. The Pseudo-Dionysian corpus is a good example. The author even tells us that he is writing hymns, though I have yet to come across an interpreter who acknowledges that fact. In doing theology through hymns he is following his Syriac predecessor, Ephrem. In fact, he is more like Ephrem than Neo-platonists. But that is the subject for another paper.

Many authors, while writing prose, use poesis to bypass the relentless linearity and self-referentiality of language.[23] These tropes offer the reader the opportunity to be opened to deep mind and transfiguration. I do not have time to more than a list of a few of these tropes: apophatic images, conflated subjects and objects, word-knots, deliberate ambiguity, self-subversion, hyperbole, irony and so forth; and there is time only to discuss two of them at any length. The following descriptions are taken from the paper "The Apophatic Image", which Vincent Gillespie and I co-authored.

Apophatic images and surfaces are themselves non-figural but allow projection from within the viewer or perception derived from ineffable knowing. Moses' encounter with the burning bush is a classic apophatic image which allows the focussing of the imagination on a single image but which eschews representation of what it communicates. . . Such images and surfaces tend to the paradoxical. Water, wine, pearls, the moon, clouds, a flame, all partake of a play of light and darkness and offer neutral surfaces on which images can resolve and dissolve themselves. The coinherence of meaning or layers of meaning in a single image is a hallmark of the liminal signifiers of the apophatic. They defy or defer the lapse into linearity and monovalency that characterises most conventional interpretation and allow for the generation of productive paradoxes within the same signifier. . .[24]

Word-knots, a term based on medieval love-knots, gather the many threads of meaning attaching to a single word—and it is a rule of thumb in such usage that all meanings are meant. Julian of Norwich's semantic clusters, especially the use of the word 'mene' is a case in point. She is using it to imply that the showing was without speech and without intermediary.

The nominal senses of mene  include: sexual intercourse; fellowship; a companion; a course of action, method or way; an intermediary or negotiator; an agent or instrument; an intermediate state; something uniting extremes; mediation or help; argument, reason or discussion. Adjectivally it can mean 'partaking of the qualities or characteristics of two extremes'. As a verb it has the senses of: to intend to convey something; to signify; to say or express something; to remember something; to advise, admonish or urge somebody to do something. It can also have the sense of: to complain; to cry out for help; to pity, sympathise with or condole with somebody. A further adjectival set of senses coheres around notions of lowness, inferiority and smallness which resonates with Julian's sense of humble self-emptying. (MED, sv mene, n.; menen, v.). Julian's exploitation of the polysemousness of this word means that it becomes the meeting place for many of her key ideas, perceptions, responses and expressions.[25]

As you can easily find the paper to read, I will go on to my final topic.

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[23] Gillespie and Ross, 'The Apophatic Image', op. cit.

[24] Gillespie and Ross, 'The Apophatic Image', 57.

[25] Gillespie and Ross, 'The Apophatic Image', Note 28, 61-2.

A Paper VII

Now let us look briefly at the words 'transform' and 'transcend', words that are casually thrown about by translators and interpreters alike. Both are anti-incarnational and theologically inaccurate. In the Christian understanding, the word that should be used is trans-figure, because when the contents of the self-conscious mind are submitted to deep mind, the way we figure things out is changed; we are given a new perspective on our interpretations that we call experience. The word 'transform' is wrong because in the process of deification frogs are not changed into princes. They remain frogs, but are transfigured into glorified frogs. Jesus in the resurrection is still wounded, but his wounds are glorified. The word 'transcend' is equally anti-incarnational: nothing is left behind. Nothing is wasted. It is through our wounds, become Christ's wounds, that we are healed. That is to say, it is through our wounds that we become kenotic, self-outpouring, of which the cross is the sign.

The Importance of the Word Behold

As I have already published a paper on the word behold, I will confine myself to the briefest of remarks. Because we have lost the practice of observing our own minds and the model of the two ways of knowing, we have also lost the sense of the importance of the word behold and its nuances both in scripture and in subsequent texts that are written by people who are soaked in the language of scripture. In consequence, our translations in English have become increasingly flattened, banal and clumsy, if not just plain wrong.  Although it is not frequently used in contemporary English, this word is not archaic: one can find it even in advertising, not to mention newspapers. It also can be heard in broadcast news. Uneducated people use it intuitively and correctly. The word occurs in the imperative more than 1300 times in the original languages of the bible; it is arguably the most important word in the bible because it sums up everything that ever has been said and ever can be said about the human seeking of and relationship with God. Patristic and medieval writers frequently use the word 'behold'—yet the word is rarely translated. As we have already noted, the Cloud author, for example, uses the word thirty-five times; it is a word essential to understanding both his text and the bible.

This single word sums up all that the bible is try to say: 'behold' is the first word that God speaks directly to the new humans after creating and blessing them; everything that follows—the serpent, and so forth—arises from a refusal to behold. The only thing God ever asks of human beings is to behold. Beholding transgresses the self-conscious mind and opens the person to what is given beyond the merely linear, that is, it opens the person to the fountain of wisdom in deep mind and the unfolding truth of the self, which is always hidden from the person whose self it is.

Silence is context and end, beholding the means. In the final analysis this is all we need to know.

Tragic But True

We have long known that the institution is of, by, and for the clergy and that the laity are just numbers with pocketbooks and don't count, but in case anyone doubted this view, here is  conviction out of the institution's own mouth (and don't think non-Catholic religious institutions are exempt: these attitudes apply across the board). With thanks to Mike Ford for sending this item.


Roman Catholic guidelines to using the Liturgy of the Hours state: 'Clergy and religious have a canonical obligation to pray it as official representatives of the Church. Increasingly, the laity are also praying it, though they do not do so in the name of the Church.'

The Fountain and the Furnace

Wipf and Stock has reprinted The Fountain and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. It is now available from Orders@wipfandstock.com. Enjoy! To enlarge, click on the image.

A Paper VI

Many modern interpreters of old texts understand the two aspects of the mind in part but fail to follow through. For example, Karsten Harries uses some of the language of the two aspects of knowing, but because his interpretation is one-eyed, he misunderstands Eckhart in his most essential aspects. Harries speaks of Eckhart's move to 'introversion'; of recentering; of Eckhart's 'central silence', and 'unknowing'. He mentions Eckhart's opening to divine light; he even speaks of two modes of knowing. But in the end he mistakenly applies the modern notion of philosophy to Eckhart's concern for method—in fact, this mistaking of method for philosophy is a very common occurrence when the model of two aspects of knowing is not applied, even though it is the model the authors of these texts used.

Harries mistakenly goes on to say that 'Eckhart is too ready to leap beyond creatures and creature  knowledge . . .' whereas, in fact, Eckhart is describing the simple shift in attention from self–consciousness, which is creature knowledge, to deep mind where the person becomes open to divine knowledge and the fullness of creation. Eckhart is giving practical instruction, but Harries, allowing for only one epistemology, cannot see this. He continues: '. . . Eckhart does not take the Incarnation . . . seriously enough; and what prevents him from doing so is the sin of pride . . ." (182)

This view of Eckhart is exactly backwards. It is Harries who does not take the Incarnation seriously enough and commits the sin of pride; he refuses to acknowledge that the most profound way of knowing takes place out of sight, i.e., beyond his control. This is the stumbling block for many modern interpreters, who refuse to acknowledge that the part of the mind that is hidden is in fact not only a thinking mind but the greater part of the rational mind. Eckhart takes the incarnation profoundly seriously because he has the humility to engage unknowing: he understands that by re-centering in the deep mind the person becomes open to be trans–figured by grace, and that, indeed, this is the only practical way, the only possible way, to proceed—today's neuro–psychology backs Eckhart, not Harries.

By contrast Harries will not relinquish the security of the prison of his own interpretive strategies, even if it prevents him from hearing what the text has to say. This is evidenced by his consistent use of the self–referential language of control and achievement to describe a process that is entirely emptying [kenotic], ungrasping, and self-forgetful; for example: 'self–transcendence', 'the power of self–transcendence', 'raise ourselves', 'self–elevation', and of course 'mystical experience' to name but a few of his problematic phrases (emphases mine). The language of achievement, grasping and control usually indicates that the interpreter who uses it does not understand what kind of text he or she is reading, much less what the text is saying. For as anyone who has practiced one-pointed meditation can tell you, anything that is given is given entirely gratuitously. As Eckhart notes above, divine knowledge, ken-gnosis, cannot be forced or achieved. In the work of silence, words become paradoxical: grasping is left behind for ungrasping; clinging to God means dispossession, and so forth.

In contrast to Harries, philosopher Karmen MacKendrick summarizes the approach I am suggesting: 'We still must use words; we still must draw out the questions that lie within philosophy. It is only that we have learned that we must use philosophy against itself, wrap our words around spaces without words, and leave them wordless, as if they could thus be kept, though we know that we lose them together with ourselves.'

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(20) The following critique of Karsten Harries is taken from ‘Houston, We Have a Problem: Restoring Binocular Vision to the Reading of Texts’ Literature and Theology, forthcoming.

(21) See the quotation at note 24.

(22) Karmen MacKendrick, Immemorial Silence (New York: SUNY, 2001), 5.