M Y S T I C I S M A N D ITS CONTEXTS:

Philip Almond

Department of Studies in Religion, University of Queensland

9 .. Can we, as is so commonly assumed, come to understand mysticism aright if we pluck it out of its socio-historical parameters and separate it from its philosophical-theological environment, thus treating it as a pure, non-relational, unmediated sort of human experience? Or, in contradistinction to this currently dominant interpretation, is it necessary in order to understand mysticism to ground the mystic in his polyform context so that one comes to realize what may well be the necessary connection between the mystic's way and his goal, the mystic's problematic and the mystic's solution to this problematic; the mystic's intentions and the mystic's actual experiences? 1

In this way, in 1983, Steven Katz characterized the methodological dilemma which has come to dominate discussion of mysticism and mystical experience since the publication of his edited collection Mystical Experience and Philosophical Analysis in 1978. 2 My overall aim in this paper is to demonstrate that the philosophical analysis of mysticism is not compelled to adopt either of these apparently mutually exclusive positions and that it is possible, perhaps even necessary, to formulate a methodology which coherently steers between the Scylla of mystical essentialism on the one hand, and the Charybdis of mystical relativism on the other. In particular, I shall argue that the recognition of the contextdependent nature of all mystical experience is not incompatible with experiential novelty nor with the occurrence of what Ninian Smart labels the experience of consciousness-purity. 3 Although there are some ambiguities in Katz's position, his methodological stance may be summarized as follows: 1. There are no unmediated experiences; and therefore 2. the content of mystical experience is determined by the religious tradition in which it occurs; consequently, 3. there are as many different types of mystical experience as there are religious traditions in which they occur. The position adopted by Katz is not an original one. I find it, as early as 1909, clearly expressed in Rufus Jones's Studies 4O

in Mystical Religion: 'There are no experiences of any sort which

are independent of preformed expectations or unaffected by the prevailing beliefs of the time . . . . Mystical experiences will be, perforce, saturated with the dominant ideas of the group to which the mystic belongs, and they will reflect the expectations of that group and that period'. 4 It is intimated too in the writings of Mircea Eliade, of H.P. Owen, and informs Bruce Garside's theory of mysticism2 Moreover, the role which prior belief and so on play in the structuring of religious experience in general had been commonplace well before the arrival of Katz's theory. However that may be, the dominant episterne for the study of mysticism for the greater part of this century had been an essentialist one. That is to say, the study of mystical texts proceeded upon the presupposition that they all, to a greater or lesser extent, were the varied expressions of an identical experience, or so many varied expressions of a limited number of experiences. In addition, they were motivated by a quest for religious truth and proceeded on the assumption that religious experience, or more particularly mystical experience, provided the crucial point of connection between religious propositions and the transcendent referent to which they variously pointed and which they more or less adequately expressed. It was then in the quest for the essence of mysticism, i.e., that essential layers of interpretation were progressively removed, that the study of mysticism was grounded. And the heterogeneous analyses of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Evelyn Underhill, Rudolf Otto, W.T. Stace, and R.C. Zaehner, were the result of it2 In part, these studies were vitiated methodologically by their inability conceptually to bridge the gap between mystical texts and the mystical experiences which they were putatively expressions of. But more importantly, they were vitiated by what amounts to a contemporary paradigm shift in epistemology towards the view that there are no human experiences except through the socio-linguistic relations which mediate them. 7 It was as a result of this paradigm shift that earlier studies of mystical experience, to the extent that they viewed mystical experiences outside of the socio-linguistic context that informed them, appeared epistemologically unsophisticated. Katz's theory has had its pervasive influence and its persuasive power because it adopted an episteme, which was and is becoming progressively culturally dominant, to overcome 41

the conceptual impasse caused by the essentialists' inability cogently to bridge the gap between post-experiential mystical discourses and the experience(s) from which they supposedly arose. Katz's model of the relationship between mystical experience and its interpretation is epistemologicaUy a more subtle one than that of the essentialists. Most significantly, it enables us to take more cogently into account the plurality of mystical utterances. As noted earlier, it entails that there is a wide variety of phenomenologically discrete mystical experiences which are due to the cultural and conceptual settings in which they originate. Thus, in interpreting mystical texts, we can avoid the problems of having to accommodate very different interpretations to an identical experience as their core. Katz's theory gives us theoretical grounds for proceeding on the assumption that there may be a correspondence between a mystical experience which is shaped by a particular context, a retrospective interpretation which reflects the same context, and consequently reflects the mystical experience also. However, although more subtle than its essentialist counterpart, it remains conceptually opaque. Primarily, this is the result of an absence of what is intended by 'context'. The overall thrust of Katz's model is that there is a necessary connection between context and experience: 'The significance of these theoretical and methodological considerations', he writes, 'is that they entail that the forms of consciousness which the mystic brings to an experience set structured and limiting parameters on what the experience will be, i.e., on what will be experienced, and rule out in advance what is "inexperienceable" in the particular, given, concrete context'. 81 want to argue that this claim, if true, is so only in a trivial sense. In the passage quoted above, Katz seems to suggest that the relationship between a mystical experience and the context out of which it arises is a logically necessary one, that the mystic cannot but experience in contextually-determinedways. While one can agree with Katz that there is a strong contingent correlation between a mystical experience and its context, he has not given us any reasons to show that the connection is a necessary one. Consequently, he has failed to show how the mystical experience is constituted by the religious traditions out of which it arose. Indeed, it is difficult to see how he could do so. As William Wainwright remarks, 'The gastronomic experiences of Eskimos, 42

Parisians and Vietnamese are quite different. There is a strong correlation between these experiences and their cultures. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to suppose that the connection was anything but contingent, and that a person from a different culture could not have the gastronomic experiences of an Eskimo'2 So also with mystical experience: there is no logically compelling reason why a Christian could not have the experience of a Hindu, though one recognises that there are persuasive contingent grounds for this not often being the case. To be sure, mystical experience may have, and often does have, a conservative ambience. By virtue of the fact that the mystic's context may be incorporated into his experience, he may experientially re-affirm or 'verify' the tradition in which he is involved. The influential effect of the pre-experiential context is also reinforced by the role, on the mystic way, of the spiritual guide. The function of the teacher is, in part, psychological for he prevents the student from straying into dangerous psychological states. But just as significant is his sociological function. The teacher guides the student into experiences that re-inforce the tradition, for he represents (in some cases is) the religious authority. But all this does not entail that the mystic cannot experientially go beyond the confines of his religious tradition. It is simply a matter of historical fact that mystical experiences (religious experiences in general, for that matter) lead to the creative transformation of religious traditions. As Gershom Scholem points out, the Kabbalist Isaac Luria 'fully accepted the established religious authority, which indeed he undertook to reinforce by enhancing its stature and giving it deeper meaning'. He continues, 'the ideas he employed in this seemingly conservative task were utterly new and seem and doubly daring in their conservative context'. 1~ Katz himself recognises the hermeneutic artifices necessary to bring radical experiences into line with incompatible traditional texts. He writes, . . . the presupposition on which the mystical use of allegory and symbolic modes of exegesis depends is that the canonical books of one's tradition do in fact possess the truth and authority claimed for them. In the absence of this presupposition one need not bother with allegory or other hermeneutical aids, the text could be dispensed with altogether in favour of the new 'higher' mystical truths vouchsafed to the mystics through their experience. 43

But, if fact, there is no displacement of scripture; there is only 're-interpretation'. Through this 're-interpretation' the extant spiritual classics are s h o w n to teach the very
doctrines revealed a n e w to the m y s t i c , n

Through a radical hermeneutic, novel experiences take on a conservative ambience through the creative transformation of traditional repositories of religious truth and authority. And, in sum, this implies that, at least in some cases, mystical experiences can go beyond the structured and limiting parameters of the particular religious traditions which form them. It can of course be argued that what appear to be exceptions to the constitutive nature of the pre-experiential context are not so at all for the reason that, although they are not constituted by the received tradition, they are nonetheless constituted by another tradition. This is the move employed by Katz to explain the fact that there is a tension between mystical experiences of union between God and the soul, and mystical experience of the unity of God and the soul. 'It should also be noted', he says, that even the absorptive, non-absorptive dichotomy at work in Christian mysticism which might appear to contradict the contextual rootedness of mystical experience in fact supports it. The unitive Christian mystics are invariably those such as Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso, who have been schooled on Plotinus, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Augustine, i.e., the stong Neoplatonic current in Christian intellectual history. 1~ This kind of tactic renders the quest to find examples of experiences which are at odds with their apparent context a nugatory one; and it gives Katz's theory a flavour of unfalsifiability. In short, experiential novelty is ruled out a priori. Explanations of the sort used above by Katz secure the theoretical consistency of his account. Unfortunately, in so securing it, the theory appears epistemologically trivial. For, although the necessary connection between context and experience has been maintained, the meaning of the former has become so inclusive as to be, to all intents and purposes, indefinable. In the final analysis therefore, while it is trivially true that the experience of a Christian mystic is formed by his 44

cultural context, it is clearly not true that the experience of a Christian mystic is formed solely by a Christian context. Moreover, the fact that Neo-Platonism has played a role not only in the forming of Christian but also of Judaic and Islamic mystical experiences is itself a strong argument against the implicit assumption in Katz's theory that the various mystical experiences of say, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are conceptually incommensurable. On the contrary, by virtue of the role that Ne~Platonism plays in all the mystical traditions of these three traditions, there is a comparability between them. And this comparability is not merely at the level of mystical discourse but, if we follow Katz, at the level of experience too. Put quite simply, there are not merely Christian and Islamic experiences, but Christian-Neo-Platonic and Islamic-NeoPlatonic mystical experiences which are commensurable by virtue of the~ shared Neo-Platonic context. The basic expistemological assertion which underlies Katz's claim that the content of mystical experience is determined by its context is that there are no unmediated experiences. It is not obviously clear what Katz intends by this statement. No argument for it is offered and no clear explanation of it is given. In Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis we are told that it means 'all experience is processed through, organised by and makes itself available to us in extremely complex ways'. And the same explanation is given verbatim with no further elaboration some five years later.iS As such it is uncontroversial. But is is clear that, for Katz, this statement entails that there cannot be what Smart calls 'consciousness-purity', what I have called elsewhere 'contentless experience' or what Robert Foreman calls a pure consciousness event. ~' In so doing, he hopes to rule out the logical possibility of the occurrence of mystical experiences which, by virtue of their contentlessness, transcend the cultural contexts which produced them, and which are, as a result, indentical irrespective of the contexts in which they occur. At the current stage of the debate, Katz has yet to offer any epistemological argument of a sufficiently general kind to compel assent to his claims that there cannot be pure experiences. He has merely asserted that all experience is by definition mediated, and has attempted to persuade us to accept this with all the rhetorical power at his disposal. But until he provides us with a sufficiently elaborate expistemology to justify his claim, there is no logical compulsion for us to accept 45

this epistemological premiss. It is important to recognise that the decision not to accept Katz's claim that there cannot be pure consciousness events in the absence of any argument to that effect does not imply rejecting the notion that mystical experiences are intimately related to the contexts in which they occur. For, in the first place, insofar as we are talking of contentful mystical experiences, it is to be expected that there will be a strong correlation between experience and context. And, in the second place, it is clear that some religious and/or philosophical contexts are more conducive to the attainment of contentless experiences than others. That is to say, the contentless experience is more probably to be attained in the context of a set of doctrines which, say, are not grounded in the assumption of an essential discontinuity between God and the world, the transcendent and the mundane. Theravada Buddhism is more conducive to consciousness-purity than is Evangelical Protestantism. Thus, it is possible to hold without inconsistency that all contentful mystical experiences are context-related, and that contentless mystical experiences, although arising out of appropriate contexts, are qua contentless context-free. I have maintained elsewhere that an appropriate methodology for the study of mystical experience needs to take into account not only the possibility of a variety of contentful mystical experiences which are context related but also the possibility that it is of the very nature of the practices and techniques associated with the 'inward way' to conduce {though not necessarily) towards the attainment of contentless states of consciousness. ~5Although the analyses of mystical experience of Ninian Smart have tended to have proceeded on the methodological assumption of the u n i t y of mystical experience,~ehe has more recently endorsed a position identical with the above: Though it is quite obvious that there are different varieties of mystical experience, and though it is quite obvious that interpretation gets, so to speak, built into experiences-thus making experiences of the same type different in particular ways--it does not follow that there does not exist a type to be identified cross-culturally as 'consciousness-purity' or as 'mystical'. Such a view has the merit of making sense both of the facts the perennialists point to and of the undoubted differences of 46

exposition, flavour, and significance as between the various traditions. 17 Granting that there are no logical problems in admitting the possibility of pure consciousness events, there are, to be sure, hermeneutical difficulties in establishing their occurrence from the analysis of mystical texts. Whether we adopt Katz's model or the model I have proposed, we are still faced with the necessity of establishing the nature of any particulr mystic's experiences by examining the retrospective interpretations of those experiences. Whatever one's theoretical position might be, common hermeneutical problems abound, and all textual analyses are corrigible. However, I would want to argue that the most appropriate methodology to adopt is one which enables us to take most seriously the only data we have, i.e., the mystic's reports. Moreover, I remain convinced t h a t there are some mystical reports which are most appropriately to be construed as interpretations of pure consciousness events. Consequently I am reluctant to endorse any a priori theory of the nature of mystical experience which may impose unjustified theoretical restrictions on the hermeneutic task. One must admit t h a t Katz is right to point out that all mystical language is grounded in specific syntactical and semantic structures, and that therefore the meaning of any one particular mystical term is only to be discerned in the totality of mystical discourse of which it is a part. But different mystical discourses are not totally incommensurable anymore than are different languages. And it is clearly not absurd to argue, as I have suggested above, that mystical discourses can be compared. Moreover, even if descriptions of mystical experiences from different religious traditions were incommensurable, it would still be possible to argue that they were derived from phenomenologicaUy identical pure consciousness events. For the contentless experience is, by its formless nature, compatible with a number of incompatible or incommensurable doctrinal systems, and herein lies its appeal for those who would argue for the unity of all religious on the basis of it. If the arguments above are cogent, then there is nothing impossible in principle {however, difficult in practice} in determining from mystical interpretations the nature of the experiences upon which they were based irrespective of whether the experiences are contentful or contentlesss. And there is no 47

conceptual absurdity in arguing that the analysis of mystical texts could demonstrate both that there are contentless experiences and that they can occur within a number of different religious contexts. All this suggests the need for a more complex theory of mystical experience than that suggested either by Katz or the essentialists. In the analysis of mystical discourse, we need to recognise that contexts may shape the nature of the experience by being incorporated into it. But also, because mystical experience may transcend its apparent context, we have to recognise that mystical experience may be decisive in the formulation of new or the revision of existing religious traditions, and this, whether it be content-filled or contentless.
References

S. Katz {ed.), Introduction to Mysticism & Religious Traditions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. 2 S. Katz (ed.), Mystical Experience & Philosophical Analysis, London: Sheldon Press, 1978. 3 N. Smart, "The Purification of Consciousness", Katz {1983), pp. 117-129. 4 R.M. Jones, Studies in Mystical Religion, London: Macmillan, 1909, p. xxxiv.
See e.g., M. Eliade, The Two & the One, London: HarviU, 1965; H. P. Owen, "Christian Mysticism", Religious Studies, 7, 1971, pp. 31-42; B. Garside, "Language and the Interpretation of Mystical Experience", International Journal for the Philsophy of Religion 3, 1972, pp. 93-102; P.C. Almond, "On the Varieties of Mystical Experience", Sophia 18, 1979, pp. 1-9.

6 p.C. Almond, Mystical Experience and Religious Doctrine Berlin: Mouton, 1982.
7

See e.g., H. H. Penner, "The Mystical Illusion", Katz, (1983), p. 89.

8 Katz (1983), p. 5 (my italics). 48

9 W . J . Wainwright, Mysticism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981, pp. 20-1. lo G. Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism, New York: Schocken, 1965, p. 21. 11 Katz (1983), p. 30 {my italics). 12 Katz (1978), p. 42. la Katz (1978}, p. 26; Katz {1983}, p. 4. 14 See Almond (1982); R.C. Forman, " P u r e Consciousness E v e n t s and Mysticism", Sophia 25 {1986}, p. 49. is See Almond {1982), pp. 157-80. 1~ See especially N. Smart, "Interpretation and Mystical Experience", Religious Studies 1 {1965}, pp. 75-87. 17 Smart {1983), p. 125.

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