Orientalism and Religion

Post-Colonial Theory, India and "The Mystic East"

Richard King

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134632343
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Orientalism and Religion offers us a timely discussion of the implications of contemporary post-colonial theory for the study of religion. Richard King examines the way in which notions such as mysticism, religion, Hinduism and Buddhism are taken for granted. He shows us how religion needs to be reinterpreted along the lines of cultural studies. Drawing on a variety of post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers, such as Foucault, Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King provides us with a challenging series of reflections on the nature of Religious Studies and Indology.

1 The power of definition
A genealogy of the idea of ‘the mystical’

Other regions give us back what our culture has excluded from its discourse.

(Michel de Certeau) ¹

The modem academic study of mysticism began in earnest towards the end of the nineteenth century.² The term ‘mysticism’ derives from the same time period and, as Michel de Cerleau demonstrates, is an offspring of ‘la mystique ’, a term that first comes to the fore in early seventeenth-century France.³ ‘Mysticism’, of course, was initially coined by Western intellectuals to refer to that phenomenon or aspect of the Christian tradition that was understood to emphasize religious knowledge gained by means of an extraordinary experience or revelation of the divine. This has remained a constant theme in the academic study of the subject. For instance, Margaret Smith describes mysticism as ‘the most vital element in all true religions, rising up in revolt against cold formality and religious torpor … The aim of the mystics,’ she says, ‘is to establish a conscious relation with the Absolute, in which they find the personal object of love.’⁴ Again, Evelyn Underbill, an important early figure in the study of mysticism, argues that the one essential feature of mysticism is ‘union between God and the soul’. Going further than this. Underhill suggests that ‘The mystic way is best understood as a process of sublimation, which carries the correspondences of the self with the Universe up to higher levels than those on which our normal consciousness works.’⁵ For Underbill, the experience of the mystic is ‘communion with a living Reality, an object of Love capable of response’. This language, of course, is uncompromisingly Western and Christian, but is applied by Underhill to all forms of mysticism throughout the different world-religious traditions. Thus, she argues that ‘Even where it conflicts with the mystic's philosophy — as in Hinduism and Neoplatonism — it is still present.’⁶

This is an astonishing statement to make — that the notions of God, communion, the soul and themes of a loving relationship between the two can be found in (actually imposed upon) all non-Christian religious experience. Underbill and Smith, of course, are not alone in this regard. It has been a presupposition of a great deal of scholarship in the study of mysticism that one can apply Christian categories (including the category of mysticism itself) to religions, cultures and experiences beyond their original context.

I would like to draw attention at this point to two important features of such a theological approach to the comparative study of mysticism. First, there is the implicit monotheism of such definitions. As any student of religion will know, belief in God is by no means exhaustive of the religious possibilities available to humankind. Buddhism, as is often stated, is a non-theistic religion in so far as it does not posit a transcendent Creator beyond the wheel of rebirths (samsūra). As the study of mysticism has developed along the lines of the comparative study of religion, theistic definitions have become increasingly problematic. Indeed, mysticism suffers from the same problems of definition as does the equally problematic term ‘religion’, not [east because of constant attempts by scholars to delineate the precise nature or ‘essence’ of the phenomena under consideration. Second, one should note the experiential emphasis in most contemporary characterizations of mysticism- As Grace Jantzen points out,⁷ this reflects the influence of post-Kantian epistemology and the seminal work of the philosopher, psychologist and early scholar of ‘the mystical’, William James. While the [imitations of narrowly theistic characterizations of the subject matter have been widely acknowledged by scholars as inappropriate, few voices have been heard that question the validity of the experientialist. dimension of contemporary definitions.

It is clear, then, that before one can examine contemporary Western characterizations of Indian mysticism one first needs to understand something about the history of the term ‘mystical’ and the sociocultural transformations that have led to its particular connotations and denotations in modern Western culture. What is required, therefore, is a genealogy of ‘the mystical’ — that is, a history of the idea that pays specific attention to the power dynamic involved in the way in which it has been defined in various historical circumstances. What often happens at this point is thai a definition of the subject matter is given, providing the basis for the ensuing discussion. However, it seems appropriate to make a few general remarks about the exercise of defining a subject matter such as ‘mysticism’ or ‘religion’.

The problem with definitions

What is mysticism? A direct and unmediated experience of the divine? Is there something we can meaningfully refer to as ‘the mystical’ in the various world religious traditions? Is the mystical the central core of religion or a marginal and peripheral aspect of it? Could mysticism even be the common core underlying the world's religious traditions? Is mysticism the experiential dimension of religion, that is religion at its most private, subjective and intense?

In beginning studies such as this it has often been seen as necessary to define the subject matter under consideration. In our case this would involve examining the question of the meaning and denotation of terms like ‘mysticism’ and ‘mystical’. Clearly, delimiting the scope of this term has proved a particularly pithy problem for contemporary scholars for a number of reasons. Before proceeding any further it would be useful to make a few points about defining the subject matter of mysticism.⁸ Virtually all contemporary studies of mysticism fail to appreciate the sense in which notions of ‘the mystical’ (including those that are adopted in the studies themselves) are cultural and linguistic constructions dependent upon a web of interlocking definitions, attitudes and discursive processes, which themselves are tied to particular forms of life and historically specific practices. Not only are contemporary notions of the ‘mystical’ subject to the cultural presuppositions of the day, they are also informed by and overlap with a long history of discursive processes, continuities and discontinuities and shifts in both meaning and denotation. Just as these various meanings and applications of ‘the mystical’ have changed over time, so too have the variety of attitudes towards them and evaluations of their importance differed according to circumstance. Defining the mystical then is never a ‘purely academic’ activity (in the sense in which one means ‘of no real consequence’), nor can it ever be completely divorced from the historical remains of past definitions of the term. In her excellent work Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism, Grace Jantzen argues:

that the idea of ‘mysticism’ is a social construction and that it has been constructed in different ways at different times. Although … medieval mystics and ecclesiastics did not work with a concept of ‘mysticism’, they did have strong views about who should count as a mystic, views which changed over the course of time … The current philosophical construction of mysticism is therefore only one in a series of social constructions of mysticism; and, like the others, is implicitly bound up with issues of authority and gender.⁹

I agree with Jantzen, not only in acknowledging the sense in which the category of ‘the mystical’ is socially constructed, but also in recognizing that as a consequence ‘the mystical’ also represents the conceptual site of a historical struggle for power and authority. If we look at the questions surrounding the definition of mysticism again in the light of this realization, a new set of questions begin to present themselves. In any given sociohistorical context, what is the agenda of power underlying a particular characterization of mysticism? What evaluative judgements are being made in the decision to include or exclude certain phenomena from the category? What is at stake in giving a particular definition of the subject matter?

As Jantzen aptly demonstrates, the way one defines ‘the mystical’ relates to ways of establishing and defining authority. This is obvious in the pre-modern context since anyone claiming direct experiential knowledge of God or the ultimate reality is in effect claiming unmediated authority to speak the truth. In a traditional Christian context, for instance, such a claim might be seen as undermining the claim of the Church to mediate between humanity and the divine. Defining mysticism then is a way of defining power. One's answers to the questions ‘What is mysticism?’ and ‘Who counts as a mystic?’ reflect issues of authority. But, one might ask, of what relevance is mysticism to power and authority in the modern Western context? Surely the way we define mysticism today has nothing to do with social or political authority. Yet this can be seen to be a misguided (if understandable) objection, if we only pause to look below the surface. The very fact that ‘the mystical’ is seen as irrelevant to issues of social and political authority itself reflects contemporary, secularized notions of and attitudes towards power. The separation of the mystical from the political is itself a political decision!

Definitions shift over time, of course, and modern notions of mysticism differ significantly from early and medieval Christian understandings of ‘the mystical’ (in so far as they had one!). On this issue I have to agree with Talal Asad when he suggests that ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion’ — or of mysticism, for that matter — ‘not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes’.¹⁰

One can use working definitions in a heuristic and provisional manner but these remain the historical product of culturally specific and politically implicated discursive processes. Such definitions, however, will never be universally applicable when one addresses different cultural milieux or historical periods. An awareness of shifting cultural, political and semantic patterns throughout history means that the abstract search for an ‘essence’ of mysticism is fundamentally misconceived. The idea of ‘the mystical’ has gone through a number of significant changes in meaning and denotation and, as Jantzen notes, ‘what counts as mysticism will reflect (and also help to constitute) the institutions of power in which it occurs’.¹¹ It would be useful, therefore, to consider some of the ways in which ‘the mystical’ has been characterized and defined by examining contemporary attitudes towards mysticism and religion.

As we shall see in the next chapter, the notion of ‘religion’ has also been subject to divergent representations, forged in a crucible of disputed power relations and discursive practices. The category of religion, in fact, is simply the production of the cognitive ‘filtering out’ or abstraction of certain aspects of a much broader cultural dynamic. This process of abstraction is founded upon the presuppositions of the Enlightenment. Other cultures and pre-Enlightenment Western culture did not view the human social world in this manner — they simply did not carve up the world in the way that we do. Religious phenomena were always seen as part and parcel of political, social and other cultural forms. The separation of religion from these is founded on a secular Enlightenment approach.

The search for the ‘essence’ of religion or the various religions, or of ‘mysticism’, is misguided since it is operating under the aegis of the essentialist fallacy that the phenomena included in the category of religion (for instance) must have something universally in common to be meaningfully classified as religious. The claim, frequently made from the methodological stance of the phenomenology of religion, that religion is sui generis — that it is a fundamental category of its own, is often put forward as a defence of the autonomy and irreducibility of religious phenomena in the overwhelmingly secular institution of the modern university.¹² The problem with this approach is that it can sometimes lead to a reification of religion. Such a claim, of course, also functions to validate the professional autonomy of scholars within the relatively new discipline of religious studies. This is acknowledged to some degree in the discipline with the widely accepted view that to do justice to the phenomena of religion requires the adoption of a multidisciplinary approach, since religions cannot really be abstracted from the cultural dynamic in which they exist, except in our minds and in our publications! Indeed, the modern category of ‘religion’ itself is a Western construction that owes a considerable debt to Enlightenment presuppositions. The term exists as an explanatory concept for classifying certain aspects of human cultural activity. As Jonathan Z. Smith argues:

If we have understood the archaeological and textual record correctly, man has had his entire history in which to imagine deities and modes of interaction with them. But man, more precisely western man, has had only the last few centuries in which to imagine religion. It is this act of second order, reflective imagination which must be the central preoccupation of any student of religion … Religion is solely the creation of the scholar's study. It is created for the scholar's analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion … must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study.¹³

However, the Enlightenment preoccupation with defining the ‘essence’ of phenomena such as ‘religion’ or ‘mysticism’ serves precisely to exclude such phenomena from the realms of politics, law and science, etc. — that is, from the spheres of power and authority in modern Western societies. Privatized religion becomes both clearly defined and securely contained by excluding it from the public realm of politics. In other words, attempts to preserve the autonomy of religion can also lead to the marginalization of religion since it becomes separated from these other realms. In fact, if we look more closely at the concept of ‘religion’ itself we see that like the ‘mystical’ the term is an explanatory construct, which, while useful for focusing upon certain aspects of cultural activity, tends to marginalize that which it purports to explain if the term is reified and segregated from the wider cultural dynamic in which it occurs. This point is well made by Talal Asad:

the insistence that religion has an autonomous essence … invites us to define religion (like any essence) as a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon. It may be a happy accident that this effort of defining religion converges with the liberal demand in our time that it be kept quite separate from politics, law and science — spaces in which varieties of power and reason articulate our distinctively modern life. This definition is at once part of a strategy (for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal Christians) of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: changing the subject
• 1 The power of definitions: a genealogy of the idea of 'the mystical'
• 2 Disciplining religion
• 3 Sacred texts, hermeneutics and world religions
• 4 Orientalism and Indian religions
• 5 The modern myth of 'Hinduism'
• 6 'Mystic Hinduism': Vedānta and the politics of representation
• 7 Orientalism and the discovery of 'Buddhism'
• 8 The politics of privatization: Indian religion and the study of mysticism
• 9 Beyond Orientalism? Religion and comparativism in a postcolonial era
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index