Mystical Experiences

• “Human language is unable to express the sense of mystical union with God” – St John of the Cross (1542-1591), Spanish mystic, priest and Catholic saint
• “The soul which becomes one with God who gives Himself in love, cannot but give itself to others in love” – St Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), Spanish mystic, nun and Catholic saint
• “God may be loved but not thought” – from the Cloud Of Unknowing, anonymous author of a 14th century book on contemplative prayer
• “The vision is not of God, Person or Spirit, but of oneness” – Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), medieval German intellectual and mystical thinker

MYSTICISM is the experience of oneness or union with the divine. “Mystical” comes from the Greek meaning “to close”, meaning the lips and eyes closed in contemplation. It is not unique to Christianity: there are Jewish mystics, Islamic mystics and religions like Buddhism lay a very great emphasis on mystical experience. Nor is it restricted to great saints, prophets or spiritual teachers. The Second Vatican Council (1962) declared that mysticism was part of the general call to holiness and is a grace (in principle) available to all believers.

The Catholic theologian Hans Kung explains that mysticism is characterised by closing the senses to the outside world and a “dissolving” of the self. Kung believes that mysticism is a reaction against organised religion, because organised religion emphasises things that are EXTERNAL like rituals and formal prayers, whereas mysticism emphasises the INTERNAL and personal side of religion. Although the Catholic Church puts a strong emphasis on communal worship and ritual, over the centuries it has produced a very high proportion of mystics.

St Bonaventure (1221-1274) was the teacher of Thomas Aquinas and a great proponent of mystical Catholicism. He argued that mystical experiences go through three stages:

1. The PURGATIVE stage where the mystic is purified by prayer and self-discipline (asceticism, or denying the body its pleasures; for example fasting)
2. The ILLUMINATIVE stage where the mystic enjoys an experience which is emotionally fulfilling and brings spiritual insights
3. The UNITIVE stage where the mystic enjoys oneness with God; this last stage always defies any sort of explanation in words (it is INEFFABLE)

In Christianity, the mystical tradition dates back to Dionysius the Areopagite (c500), one of the first great Christian mystics. Dionysius was influenced by the philosophy of neoplatonism, which regarded the material world as a shadowy illusion and the ultimate reality being the Form of the Good (which Christians regarded as God). Dionysius regarded the true destiny of the soul as union with God and the way towards this was through a life of virtue and asceticism.

• You should reflect on how the mystical ideas of Dionysius and Bonaventure are represented in Aquinas’ conception of the Beatific Vision.

One of the greatest modern writers about mysticism was William James, who noted that the accounts of the mystics were more like music than conceptual speech. Frequently they use paradoxes, such as “whispering silence”, “dazzling obscurity” or “teeming desert”. James believed that mystical experiences were “windows” into a wider, more inclusive world. For James, mystical states have four characteristics:

1. They are INEFFABLE – words cannot describe what they are like
2. They are NOETIC – they are states of knowledge rather than just emotional experiences and they bring new insights beyond what the rational intellect could come up with
3. They are TRANSIENT – usually short-lived and cannot be sustained for long periods
4. Throughout the experience the mystic is PASSIVE – he or she is overwhelmed by the experience and not in control of what is happening

• “The Mystic” is a character in A.J. Ayer’s essay. Ayer argues that mystical experiences are in fact purely emotional experiences and do not represent any sort of knowledge. In fact, he claims they are “meaningless”.

Evaluating Religious Experiences: Positive

William James (1842-1910) was open-minded about religious experiences. He recognised that the claims made by people who had had religious experiences were highly SUBJECTIVE and couldn’t carry any authority with people who hadn’t shared the experience. However, he also thought that, in its purest form, religious experience was beneficial for individuals and for society. He was impressed by the link between mysticism and SAINTLINESS. According to James, saints are concerned with rooting out selfishness and loving others. This leads them to happy, healthy lives and provides a great role model for other people. This is an important point: religious experiences might be psychologically or socially valuable even if they are purely subjective.

A similar point was made by the psychologist Carl Jung (1958). Jung was impressed by the “healing” effects of religious experiences, saying “Those who have it possess a great treasure, a source of life, meaning and beauty which gives a new splendour to the world. It is overwhelming and healing and therefore of great validity.”

Not everyone has agreed with this. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) took the opposite view from William James, regarding the saints as being “sick” and a life of selflessness being a sort of dishonest slave-morality. Jung’s old mentor Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) thought that religious experiences were psychological illusions and that it was childish and self-destructive to hold on to them: they needed to be outgrown.

Evaluating Religious Experiences: Critical Views

There are two sorts of problems created by religious experiences: theological and philosophical.

Theologically, the official Church has never been enthusiastic about individuals having personal access to God outside the official channels of worship, prayer and reading Scripture. The Church has tended to regard the definitive revelation of God coming through Jesus Christ and the Church is the custodian of that revelation. This is why mystics have never achieved more than cautious approval from the Church authorities. From the Church’s viewpoint, wherever there are claims of people having special inner experiences, there is the danger of delusion and fanaticism.

A good example of this tendency is the Christian experience of SPEAKING IN TONGUES (or “glossolalia“). This powerful religious experience is recorded at the birth of the Christian Church, described in Acts 2: 1-4, and is recorded many times throughout the New Testament. The phenomenon seemed to die out in the established Church but re-emerged again with the Pentecostal Churches at the start of the 20th century (the famous “Azusa Street Revival“). Nevertheless, Church leaders have always felt uneasy with the phenomenon, which seems very close to hysteria. In the New Testament, St Paul writes to the Christians in Corinth who were experiencing a great outpouring of these spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 12: 1-10). The problem was that those members who didn’t have intense religious experiences were being treated as inferior or inauthentic Christians. Paul writes that, although no one speaks in tongues more than him, religious experiences by themselves don’t mean anything. This is the context for his famous “Love is….” speech – that living a life of loving kindness is ultimately more important than religious experiences and spiritual gifts.

The theological objections to religious experiences are essentially practical and concerned with “keeping a lid on” potentially chaotic and divisive behaviours. The philosophical objections go deeper than this and are wittily summed up by Bertrand Russell:

• “From a scientific point of view we can make no distinction between the man who eats little and sees heaven and the man who drinks much and sees snakes”

The key word in Russell’s quip is “scientific” and he is referring to the fact that starvation and intoxication can both bring on hallucinations (remember, fasting is part of the ascetic discipline that leads to mystical experiences). Is there a difference between an OBJECTIVE experience of the divine and a SUBJECTIVE delusion? If there is a difference, how can we tell one from the other? The same question was raised by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who asked whether there was any difference between saying (1) “God spoke to me in a dream” and (2) “I dreamed that God spoke to me”. The grammar of the sentences makes (1) sound like an objective experience of an external God and (2) sound like a subjective experience of an imaginary God, but does the distinction go any deeper than words?

This linguistic approach formed the basis for a 20th century assault on religious experience, led by A.J. Ayer who argued:

• “In describing his vision, the mystic does not give us any information about the external world; he merely gives us indirect information about the condition of his own mind”

Ayer’s position is that of the LOGICAL POSITIVISTS. This 20th century school of philosophy argued that only scientific methods produce genuine knowledge of the external world, only these sort of statements could be “true” or “false”. Any statements not based on empirical evidence were either “meaningless” or else merely recorded the mental states of the speaker.

• Ayer’s argument is set out fully in his essay.

In the final analysis, people who have religious experiences CLAIM they are encountering the divine, but it is always possible they are deluding themselves and, philosophically, it is hard to work out which to believe without buying into a very reductionist outlook like Logical Positivism. William James, as a great pragmatist, was prepared to argue for “whatever works” – effectively saying, it’s more important that religious experiences HELP people rather than understanding where they come from, particular if being sceptical about where they come from ends up snuffing out the religious experiences themselves. John Bowker in The Sense of God (1973) takes a different approach. He suggests that EMPIRICAL VERIFICATION (such as the Logical Positivists want) is completely the wrong way to approach religious experiences. Instead he recommends a principle of SINCERITY. In other words, the honesty of the person is the best clue to the truth of their claim to have had a religious experience. Taking this view, many of the claims of the mystics must carry great weight, since they are clearly honest, authentic and moral people in every other respect.

© Jonathan Rowe, Spalding Grammar School (used with permission)