Christian Mysticism

The claim

Every affirmation about God is more false than true, because the terms are drawn from creatures. Negation takes us further, and beyond negation there is a darkness that is not absence.

What it held

The philosophical core is apophatic theology, and it is a rigorous position rather than a mood. Pseudo-Dionysius, writing in Syria around 500 under an apostolic pseudonym, sets out the procedure: affirm what God is, then deny it, then deny the denial, since to call God not-good is as inadequate as to call him good.

Eckhart pushes it furthest. He distinguishes God, who can be spoken of, from the Godhead, who cannot, and preaches that a person should pray to God to be rid of God — meaning the conceptual idol. He also holds that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one ground, which is the sentence that got twenty-eight of his propositions condemned the year after he died.

What keeps this philosophical rather than merely devotional is that it is argued. The claim is about the limits of predication: any term applied to an infinite being is being used outside the conditions that give it sense. That is a thesis about language, and Wittgenstein's remark about what cannot be spoken of is closer to it than either would find comfortable.

How it argued

Negation, then negation of negation. Also paradox used deliberately, on the view that a contradiction can indicate what a consistent sentence cannot.

What it was arguing against

Any theology confident that its terms apply straightforwardly to God, and any account of the spiritual life as primarily a matter of correct belief.

Where it disagreed with itself

Whether union means the soul becomes indistinguishable from God, which the church repeatedly refused. Whether the mystical is a separate faculty or the ordinary intellect at its limit.

Common misconceptions

That mysticism is anti-intellectual. Eckhart was a Paris master twice over, Pseudo-Dionysius is doing technical Neoplatonism, and John of the Cross wrote systematic commentaries on his own poems. And apophasis is not agnosticism: the darkness is held to be a presence rather than an absence.

How it began

Neoplatonism entering Christian theology through a forger of genius, whose apostolic pseudonym gave the whole tradition an authority it could not otherwise have had.

What became of it

Continuous. Suppressed at intervals, rediscovered at others, and now studied as much by philosophers as by theologians.

Lasting influence

Aquinas cites Pseudo-Dionysius over 1,700 times. Eckhart shaped German idealism through Hegel and Schopenhauer. Heidegger read him closely, and so did Derrida.

Why it still matters

The question of whether ordinary predicates can apply to a transcendent object is a live problem in philosophy of religion under the name of religious language.

Put another way

A cloud on a mountain that you enter rather than clear.

Where to start

The Mystical Theology. It is shorter than most articles about it.

The surprising bit

Pseudo-Dionysius was accepted as the Athenian converted by Paul in Acts for a thousand years. The forgery was suspected in the Renaissance and settled in the nineteenth century — by which time his authority had shaped the entire tradition.

In their own words

Connections

Answers

Neoplatonism, Patristics

Influenced

German Idealism

The verdict

A tradition built on a forgery and rigorous anyway.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy