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Can We Thematize
Mystical Consciousness?
Louis
Roy, O.P.
Introduction
A
paradox: speaking about the unspeakable. While claiming that their
experience is ineffable, many mystics talk about it. However, it is far
from obvious that mystical consciousness can successfully be brought to
speech. Perhaps it is impossible to test the validity of religious
accounts which are shaped by previous assumptions and thus do not escape
the idiosyncrasies of individual mystics as well as of their particular
traditions. Perhaps it is impossible to distinguish between adequate and
inadequate expressions.
Hence,
4 questions. First, among the available formulations of mystical
experience, would it be helpful to distinguish two basic genres? Second,
what intellectual operations are involved in any kind of thematization?
Third, what does the realm of mysticism consist in? Fourth, can mysticism
be articulated, and if so, to what extent?
1. Expressions of mystical
experience
2
different genres: the symbolic (plain or artistic) and the systematic (=
thematization).
2. How do we go about thematizing?
3
fundamental views: naïve realism, idealism, and critical realism.
The
first two usually incorporate a conceptualistic view of thinking,
according to which conceptualization impoverishes the vividness of
perception. But for the third, concepts are the results of acts of
abstracting and of understanding which are enriching.
3. Mysticism as a realm of human
experience
4
realms of meaning: common sense, theory, interiority, and mysticism. The
first two deal with objects, which are mediated
by sense data and by meaning. The last two are realms of immediacy, since they directly connect us with our data of
consciousness.
4. The possibility and extent of
thematization
Mystics
inevitably make two judgments, “this experience is unique, different
from anything else,” and “I need to be unconditionally faithful to
this experience.” These judgments comprise a kernel of meaning and
knowing.
We
observe natural transitions between mysticism, its symbolic rendering,
and systematic inquiry about it.
Formulations
of mysticism do not duplicate or replace it. Mysticism is immediate,
since it belongs in the realm of the second interiority, whereas speech
takes us into the world mediated by meaning.
The
thematization in question is about mysticism, not about its “object”
or “objective,” namely, God. We have to distinguish between the inadequacy
of our talk about God and the adequacy
that may come to characterize the study of our approach to God, namely,
of mysticism. Although we cannot capture the divine mystery, mysticism
(that is, our experience of that mystery) can be understood and
appropriately expressed.
Bibliography
Louis
Roy, O.P., Transcendent
Experiences: Phenomenology and Critique (University of Toronto
Press, 2001);
Mystical Consciousness: Western
Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers
(SUNY Press, forthcoming, probably at the end of 2002).
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