Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy

Interchange in the Wake of God

David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, Duane Williams, David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, Duane Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317090939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Exploration of the interface between mystical theology and continental philosophy is a defining feature of the current intellectual and even devotional climate. But to what extent and in what depth are these disciplines actually speaking to one another; or even speaking about the same phenomena? This book draws together original contributions by leading and emerging international scholars, delineating emerging debates in this growing and dynamic field of research, and spanning mystical and philosophical traditions from the ancient, to the medieval, modern, and contemporary. At the heart of which lies Meister Eckhart, perhaps the single most influential Christian mystic for modern times. The book is organised around significant historical and contemporary figures who speak across the intersections of philosophy and theology, offering new insights into key interlocutors such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Isaac Luria, Eckhart, Hegel, Heidegger, Marion, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Žižek. Designed both to contribute to current trends in mystical theology and philosophy, and elicit dialogue and debate from further afield, this book speaks within an emerging space exploring the retrieval of the mystical within a post-secular context.

Part II

Receiving mystical tradition in post/modernity

1 Learning presence

The mystical text as intimate hyper-communication across time

Oliver Davies

Few texts present us with such challenges, though also potential resources, as those chiefly medieval works which have attracted the designation of ‘mystical’ in our modern age. We must include within these a whole range of different types of text, and genres, reflecting different cultural and linguistic contexts. Moreover, the personalities of the authors also seem widely divergent, such as is the case with the two mystics represented here: Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart. And yet, for all their variety, there also seems to be something instantly recognizable for the reader about a ‘mystical’ text. Somehow it imposes itself upon us, or finds its way into us, suddenly opening up new horizons or layers of awareness in us. These can multiply and converge to the extent of engendering within the dedicated reader a sense of being now differently in the world. We can experience something very intimate, formative, and distinctive then, in the reading of a mystical text.

I The structure of ‘hyper-communication’

The contours of intimacy

But it is precisely this intimacy which creates a major obstacle for us in the objective analysis of mystical texts. The nature of this obstacle becomes clearer when we consider the background of a hermeneutic of reading which Paul Ricoeur developed in the mid-1970s.¹ If, for Schleiermacher, the hermeneutical task was to lay bare the author who stands behind the text, with her or his particular intentionalities, then, for Ricoeur, it is to allow the ‘unfolding of the world’ from ‘before the text’ or ‘in front of the text’. This refers to a more general concept of reference: reference as the evocation of a world. More specifically, it potentially allows a true ‘critique of ideologies’ where the reader’s own pre-thematic ‘belonging to the world’ (which is where our prejudices lie) is interrogated by the collocation of a different way of ‘being in the world’ which the text communicates.² This ‘being-in-the-world’ is communicated by the text not through ‘the referential function of ordinary discourse’, which Ricoeur calls ‘first degree reference’, but rather by ‘second degree reference’, in which, for Ricoeur, ‘the world is no longer manifested as an ensemble of manipulatable objects, but as the horizon of our life and project, in short as a Lebenswelt, as being-in-the-world’.³ It is this level which is pre-thematic, lying at a point prior to the subject-object divide. It sits within the pre-conceptual mode of our belonging to the world. Ricoeur’s view is that only a hermeneutics (or phenomenological hermeneutics) which is in medias res can map this recalibration of our pre-thematic ‘being-in-the-world’, which the Husserlian phenomenological method as such, with its presupposition of the priority of the subject-object divide, cannot do.⁴

Ricoeur acknowledges however that his phenomenological hermeneutics of the text cannot itself thematise the focal point of our human intimacy. In the immediacy of oral encounter, which is the face-to-face of live presence, the binary of distance and proximity required for reflexive philosophical thought is lacking: there, in the mutual recognition of presence, all is intimacy. Ricoeur’s turn to the text, and so to the distancing of language from the live person or author who is its source, is his embrace of the possibility of a critical philosophical hermeneutics which can work with objectified language within the oscillation of ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’ that marks out the hermeneutical space of the text. But this objectification already indicates the limits of Ricoeurian hermeneutics. Human intimacy may be pre-thematic, but it is also the dynamic and transformational centre of human social life, the locus of which lies precisely in the interfacial encounter.

The argument we are making here, then, is that an analysis of ‘mystical texts’ may offer a new opening within the hermeneutics of intimacy. Such texts constitute a specific genre of communicative intimacy. The ingression of the mystical text, as the productive representation of another person’s interiority of heart and mind, into our own interior space, constitutes a moment of intimate communication. Such an analysis shows, we shall argue, that despite the distance which separates medieval author and modern reader, these specific kinds of texts allow this to be a real communication of interfacial intimacy.

A claim of this kind has to find a robust underpinning within a new kind of objectivity if it is to be credible. And, as we shall argue, recent advances in evolutionary anthropology and social neuroscience or the neuroscience of social cognition offer just such an objective grounding of what is, after all, the focal point of our subjectivity (interfacial encounter with the live human other). In combination, these two modes of reflection on our primary sociality as human beings combine to point to a set of anthropological constants or ‘species-wide’ characteristics in our embodied communicativity. These are a substrate of (biological) responses which are constitutive of our social embodiment as human beings at any time and place. These include affectivity, empathy, reflexivity and evaluation. We can call these our operative social constants. In effect, they predate the radical linguistic-cultural diversity which is also constitutive of who we are today. We shall argue in this paper that the combination of a species-wide set of early biological communicative structures, with the variability and diversity of more recent cultural response, opens up the identification of a further, key, human constant. This concerns the relation that obtains between our early biology and our later culture, in each and every concrete act of communication. We can call this ‘convergence’ and define it as a functional social constant. Convergence occurs where our late advanced linguistic consciousness and our early social cognition (in its operative functions) combine, in the production of human wholeness. As we shall argue, for this to happen, a process of ‘disarming’ language needs to take place, whereby the inheritance of language in more recent tool-making and tool-use needs to give way to its more ancient inheritance in the bonding systems of our early ancestors. ‘Convergence’ requires a renunciation of the paramountly controlling and instrumentalizing aspects of language in favour of its paramountly expressive and inter-communicative dimensions. Convergence is supported also by non-linguistic forms of interactive expression and communication (such as dance and music). Finally, we need to note that neuroscience identifies the biological substrate of our operative constants to be self-organizing in themselves and so to be not just ‘me’ and ‘you’ but also world. ‘Convergence’ not only leads to integration and wholeness in our personhood as both body and mind. It also allows our detached, linguistic self to be ‘in the world’. Combining as consciousness with the operative constants of the human body is at the same time our being rooted and at home in the world.

We shall argue that the diversity of culture is constrained by the fact that any culture – through convergence – can reflect the basal sociality of our embodiment which precedes it. It can re-present that biology in ways that effect the communication of the interfacial at a distance and across time. Furthermore, culture can powerfully enhance the bio-energy of the human body in its primary sociality (as well as suppressing or distorting it). The thesis sketched out here, then, is that those cultural artefacts which we know today as ‘mystical texts’, can be shown – in their distinctive use of language – to be a particular kind of cultural product which exemplifies this re-presentation of our fundamental, interfacial social biology, in ways that ground powerfully expressive and intimate forms of communication across space and time: not just the communication of intimacy in fact but also, and more directly, intimate communication.

Mysticism as a project in human self-understanding

If intimacy is a human universal which is both dynamic and socially creative, then we should be deeply interested in the survival of medieval texts into the modern period, as intimate communication. These are texts, moreover, which appeal to a much broader audience than those who would place themselves within the same Roman Catholic tradition, for instance. In fact, as ‘spirituality’, mystical texts find readers far beyond the borders of institutional religion in any shape or form. But they also have a certain illegibility for us in the modern period in the sense that they were created under different skies and reflect a different cosmology. In this context, cosmology includes the modes of being both body and mind together (our embodied practices of living) which are inevitably influenced by what we think matter is, with implications for how we can be in the material world around us as embodied, mobile, intelligent form. Cosmology here becomes cultural.⁵ To read texts as a modern reader, which were produced by authors with pre-modern assumptions about what matter is, how the world is constructed and what the nature and role of language is within that world order, is inevitably to encounter a communicative mode of being human in the world which will in subtle and important ways escape our own conceptions and experiences of this. Through such texts, we may receive communicatively a mode of being human in the world which we could not ourselves produce. This parallels Ricoeur’s belief in the possibility of a ‘critique of ideologies’ where our pre-thematic ‘being-in-the-world’ is challenged by an alternative ‘being-in-the-world’, as this is communicated through Ricoeur’s ‘second reference’ of the text.⁶ It is not the same as Ricoeur’s ‘second reference’ however, since in the mystical text, as we shall argue, it is not the world that is represented as something beyond the text (to which the text ‘refers’). Rather, the operative constants – our primary sociality – of interfacial encounter are embodied in the text. This means that the text at some level communicates the intimacy of interfacial encounter participatively, not as world to be referred to, but as the experience of world, indeed of a shared world, across space and time.

The notion of ‘presence’ in the title of this paper points to the further possibility of the reproduction of a ‘convergent’ mind–body relation or wholeness in concrete human caritative acts. As we shall argue, a new legibility of medieval texts as intimate communication may significantly contribute to developing shared, critical philosophical understandings of our common human capacities for bond-formation, across the significant cultural and religious boundaries which divide us.

Fullness of presence

In fact, it makes sense to preface a new analysis of mystical texts with a brief evocation of early twentieth century France, when medieval philosophy, modern philosophy and modern science first came together around questions of mystical ‘presence’. Intimacy denotes presence, which is a key theme in the work of the French Jesuit Joseph Maréchal. In 1908/9, Maréchal published ‘On the Feeling of Presence in Mystics and Non-Mystics’ in which he argued that the mystical sense of the presence of God is cognate with our perception of reality. On this account, mystical knowledge is a direct intuition of the divine.⁷ Here Maréchal is creatively harnessing elements in modern psychology to the medieval Thomist account of the judgment of actuality or the concrete real. Mystical knowledge then emerges as the unparalleled cognition of the reality of God (though without concretisation). The mystic grasps the presence of God through direct intuition, but grasps God as non-objectifiable.

For us today, the word ‘presence’ is likely to evoke Heidegger’s reductive reformulation of Christian metaphysics (noting, in fact, that in 1909, Heidegger entered and left the Jesuit novitiate, completing a doctorate in 1913 on the Maréchalian theme of ‘The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism’). But another term from this period intriguingly offers a quite different perspective: the more participative and cognitive theme of Thomist ‘connaturality’. Pierre Rousselot draws out this dimension in Thomas’ work, developing the idea that there is a symmetry between self and world, inner and outer. Since there is a deeply grounded ‘sharedness’ between how we are and how the world is, which grounds our capacity for true perception, we can say that we belong in the world, as cognizing, percipient subject, and are not merely observers of it. For Rousselot, ‘connaturality’ contributes to a ‘thick’ account of faith as involving more than just cognition. In The Eyes of Faith and against the rationalists, he develops a powerful account of the dependence of cognition, in faith, on the operation of the will which, where it is ordered to God in love, makes faith, as true cognition, possible.⁸

The ‘connaturality’ of Rousselot’s Thomism found its way also into the thought of Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson. For Blondel, philosophy is consummated in the loving act, and his notion of mysticism is one which reflects this structure. For Bergson, mysticism leads to ‘a world of confident, productively concrete and forwardly-looking action’.⁹ In both Blondel and Bergson then, connaturalitas – with its implications of knowledge through our belonging in the world – became associated specifically with mystical knowledge, which led to a certain kind of committed and transformed life of loving action. Here we can find an outline of a philosophical route into intimacy, against the background of a thomistically participative account of cognition, one moreover which expressly grounds itself in these later French writers within mystical discourse.

Science and the face-to-face

It is this same theme of ‘connaturality’ as our participative belonging in the world which comes into view in recent science of the social nexus of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Mystical theology and continental philosophy: interchange in the wake of God
• PART I: Receiving mystical tradition in post/modernity
• PART II: Apophasis and continental philosophy
• PART III: Revisiting Eckhart through Heidegger
• PART IV: Re-readings and new boundaries
• Index