Might it be because Muslim mysticism slumbers in the form of “Koranic seeds” within the values, if not the formulations, of the dogma? Or is it down to the Neoplatonic influence? In any case, the first mystics appeared in eighth-century Iraq, as bands of ascetics who cultivated trust in God (tawakkol). They “repeated” God’s name and began to believe in a prior communication between God and His creature. A little later, clad in white woolen garments (suf), the Sufis gathered into spiritual circles and concerts, bent on a loving union with God. Schools sprang up in the cities of Basora and Baghdad, then across Afghanistan, India, and Egypt, until the advent of the Master, al-Hallaj, a mystic who was martyred in 922 C.E.23 The Hellenic origins of this mystical experience, which took the form of a poetic quest, are not in doubt. It was a “science of the heart” that sought to transform the sensible body into pure “spirit” (in philosophical terminology) through the burning love that consumes the saint, disposed to “isolate himself before the One.” “Legal war” thus mutates into “inner war,” and the Seal of Saints embodied by Jesus is set against Muhammad’s Seal of Prophets; God is henceforth to be sought within, and the mystic, rather than overthrow the Law, transcends it. “I have become the One I love and the One I love has become me. We are two spirits infused in a single body,” wrote al-Hallaj.
Whether focused on reciprocal love (al-Nuri), private inspiration (Ibn Karram), or union with God (al-Hallaj), Sufism borrowed the spiritual methods of Christian monachism while influencing that movement in return. It also appropriated Hindu and Persian techniques.
Accused of heresy and impiety, stigmatized for its incompatibility with the Law of Islam, Sufism finally found a direction: the compromise between juridical authority and ecstasy paved the way for its esoteric brotherhoods. Notwithstanding some serious deviations that degenerated into opium clubs and sham whirling dervishes with dodgy morals, in the eighteenth century, philosophical Sufism became an “existential monism,” with the Andalusian Ibn al-Arabi: no distinction between the soul and God any longer subsists in the mystical union.24 Committed to immanentism, eschewing neither literal meaning (anathema to the Shi’a) nor sacred meaning, this current believed that the Absolute cannot become conscious of itself other than through Man in the image of God. In Sufi thought, then, immanence and transcendence are not mutually exclusive, and opposite meanings (as in the “primitive words” studied by Freud) coincide, since the Unique is manifest in the All. “I mean that you absolutely do not exist, and never will exist by yourself alone, any more than by Him, in Him or with Him. You cannot cease to exist, because you do not exist. You are Him and He is you, without dependence or causality. If you accept that quality of your existence (which is to say, Nothingness), then you shall know Allah. Otherwise you shall not.” As a result, “the prayers of lovers are blasphemous.” There are five steps leading to this revelation of Being at the same time as the impossibility of Being: “there is of him only Him”; “there is of you only You”; “there is of me only Me”; “I-ness, you-ness, he-ness, all these are viewpoints that add to the eternal essence of the One.” Set in motion by God, the experience soars into the “limitless,” where it is vividly clear that only “he who is not in love sees his own face in a pool.”
Meanwhile, as of the eleventh century, mystical poetry had put down roots and thrived, feeding off profane, erotic, and bacchic poetry. The “sultan of lovers,” Ibn al-Farid was one such,25 along with the Persian mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi, founder of the whirling dervishes brotherhood,26 and the Turkish poets Nesimi and Niyazi.
This adogmatic Muslim mysticism resisted integration into the Islamic mainstream, until the Sufi theologian and philosopher al-Ghazali proposed a “mystical orthodoxy” that would complete traditional knowledge with a “taste” or realization of God: an intimate knowledge that was gained through tempered asceticism.27 Sufism went on to spread the cult of thaumaturgical saints—including al-Hallaj,28 the most revered of all despite his excommunication—and became a “popular religion,” treating the Muslim faithful to that “taste” the jurists had denied them and so reinvigorating the moderate morality of that faith.29
“Hello? Can you hear me, Sylvia? Where am I, I’m in Thailand! Told you, didn’t I? Okay, my mistake. The Phuket beaches, crawling with tourists…Fantastic. No sign of the tsunami…at least not around here…Me, scared?…Of course people have short memories, what do you expect, that’s life…Oh, the usual, swimming and sleeping. And I’ve been going to this Buddhist temple…Sylvia, please, the Muslims are in Indonesia…Actually no, I haven’t converted, or not yet. But I’m great chums with one of the bonzes. I’m approaching the Void. Go ahead, laugh! If you’re not wise to Nothingness, my dear, you may as well give up the mysticism game. Even your baroque saint must have known that…The Void is at the bottom of everything, you dig?…How do you mean, compatible with my lifestyle? These Buddhists are highly pragmatic fellows…Tomorrow I go to Banda Aceh with this NGO, old friends of mine, they’re building boats for the fishermen who lost everything in 2004, you know. We’re going to walk the sandbank in Lhoong…really beautiful…So you’re surprised to see me doing something humanitarian? That’s right, it’s got a lot to do with the boys and their gurus…They’re fine, thanks…And so’s Stéphanie, why do you ask. You know it’s finished…Just a stop-off in India…Yes, of course we’ll do a book, with photographs, it’s the trend, and besides it’s my job…That’s right, everything is connected. I don’t have to explain that to you of all people…Ciao, take care…kisses and all that, you know.”
Do I know or am I forgetting? Inimitable Bruno! He’s far away, and he’s who he is. Let him make his own discoveries in his own way. He can sort out his syncretism however he wants, I’m all for the great leap from Paris glitz to global compassion, but I’d rather he went into analysis, it would save so much time…Oh well. I guess I don’t always take the shortcuts either, I follow my own detours. With Teresa, for instance.
So, while it’s true that Judaism contains veins of mysticism, that the Upanishads relish sensual joys and annihilation in the sounds of the language, that Muslim Sufism reveals Being and its impossibility together, and that Zen koans are peerless propagators of the Void, it was in Christianity that mystics male and female were to find their royal road. Like Saul on the road to Damascus.
Are the mystical currents that flow through the three monotheisms the result of interferences, contaminations, influences, or structural coincidences? Did the Hassidim sway Meister Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler after introducing the thought of Maimonides into the ghetto of Worms? Or was it the other way around? Did the Arab peripatetics in the wake of al-Kindi30 transmit the symphony of the two great philosophies of antiquity, Platonism and Aristotelianism, via Albert the Great31 to Eckhart himself? And in particular the theory of analogia entis that posits the paradoxical nature of creation as at once Being and Nothingness? The ebullience of Being as the negation of negation? Nobility as humility and detachment?
Whatever the channels and facets of this convergent experience, all of whose manifestations are regarded as “mystical,” it has to be acknowledged that the true “deification of the Christian,” or “theogenesis,” was the doing of Greek patristics and its thinkers such as Origen,32 Gregory of Nyssa,33 and Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite. What Saint Augustine called abditum mentis, the “hidden place” of the soul, and its sequence of conversio/reformatio/conformatio, became tools for attaining ecstasy. Thus began a complex history during which the Church would bestow two complementary meanings on the expression corpus mysticum, the union with impossible, indispensable Love.
On the one hand the Eucharist invites each believer to incorporate the Body of God, for Christ is the one true love object: “This is my body, this is my blood.” Eat me, I am in you, and you can form part of the body of this ideal Subject, this single being who redeemed every member of humanity. A modest event during the early years, the Mass grew ever more sumptuous, performing its osmosis under cupolas ringing with music and nave
s lined with sculptures and frescoes: an erotic, purified, intense osmosis whereby men and women alike identified with the Body of Christ and its mortifications, death and resurrection. In Communion I swallow the bread and wine, Jesus’s flesh and blood, I introject the Christ, I am Him and He is me, we fuse in hierogamic union. I do not participate in, I partake of His Passion and resurrection, of Hell and Heaven, of Nothingness and bliss.
On the other hand and at the same time, the community of the faithful, which is to say the Church, is born of this sacramental communion and assures its continued social and political relevance.
Faced with those Christians who still take communion—scarcer in the West than on other continents—I follow Freud in wondering whether the Eucharist does not perhaps constitute a necessary psychodrama, one which allows participants to experience in a “closed space,” in the recondite security of the service, the ravages of desire in order to quench them and as far as possible preserve the community from them. I would like to think so. Or perhaps on the contrary, this sacrament slyly authorizes, if not brutally imposes, the sadomasochistic truth of human passions at the very heart of community and intercommunity relations. Persecutions, pogroms, purges, roundups of heretics, inquisitorial trials, all were unfailingly sealed by the sacrament of Communion…Christianity’s two thousand years of history bear witness to the vertiginous effects of this pendulum. Today, at last, we are surely justified in hoping that the time for stillness has arrived. Pope Benedict XVI plays Mozart, after all, while certain other faith leaders trumpet holy war. Not that this defuses the tensions of identity politics, or prevents the reaction against real or supposed aggressors from poisoning the very discourses that most flaunt their commitment to helping the less fortunate, or to defending human rights. Murderous violence answers violence, intolerance combats intolerance, and mindless fundamentalists, both Muslim and Christian, plan massacres bloodier than the Saint Bartholomew of Voltaire’s nightmares.
Throughout these vicissitudes, it is none other than the bodies of the mystics of both sexes, delivered through their writings, that offer themselves as the secret laboratory in which human beings have been able to reach maximum lucidity about the physical and psychic excesses of their fantasy-induced transports. In the wake of this solitary, perilous experimentation, reforms, foundations, and schisms arose to ensure, over the long term, the vitality of illusions and the renewal of both doctrine and institutions.34
From the middle of the twelfth century on, the phrase corpus mysticum no longer denoted the Eucharist but simply the Church, and corpus verum was used for the osmosis with Jesus through Communion. The adjectives mysticum (“hidden”) and verum (“knowably real”) changed places, and a chiasmus appeared: from now on it was the Church, the social body of Christ, that would enclose the “hidden meaning” of the sacramental “true body,” rendered visible in the form of consecrated bread and wine. This meant that nothing in Catholicism was now hidden! With the Church presenting itself as ever more universal and inclusive, the mystery it celebrated and enshrined could no longer be a secret for anyone. It follows that the transubstantiation of the God-man into bread and wine was no longer a mystery properly speaking, but a “knowable reality” that invites communicants to immerse themselves in it, body and soul, desire and reason; to each his or her own journey within a truth susceptible of being universally acknowledged. The appeal to extreme individual experience was henceforth coupled to a wholesale communitarian, not to say pragmatic, concern.
The revolution undergone by the corpus mysticum entailed momentous consequences. Before, the body of Christ signified by the hidden sacrament (the mysterious, mystic Eucharist) linked apostolic history to the present Church. Now, the Church was the hidden signified of the visible signifier that is Christ’s body. Christian history and the sacrament stood connected to, yet separate from, the Church, which was entirely their extension: mysterious, mystical, and yet open to all. This curious topology could not but inscribe itself within the subjects who shared in it, for it was in the social and political reality of the present Church that the mystical third (the union) must be produced. The Church was therefore summoned to reform itself, its mystical body had to be constructed as a fusion of community and communion, of the social bond and the bond of desire for the Other. At that point two movements became possible: the Reformation, with its social imperatives, which was already underway (fourteenth to fifteenth centuries); but also, in a parallel counterpoint, the supernatural excesses, the fervid amorous transports, the ever more bizarre extremes that enacted the risks of subjective freedom and prefigured from afar the baroque faith of the Counter-Reformation (late sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries).
It was during the thirteenth century, then, that the peculiar profile of Christian mysticism took shape. Just as Thomas Aquinas35 was applying Aristotelian philosophy to biblical and evangelical revelation in order to show that the unity of God was accessible to reason, a galaxy of mystics prepared to sound out and diffract this same reason. They infiltrated it with the logics of love and Nothingness, giving the Greek Logos a pre-Socratic slant, and, rather than seek to prove God’s existence philosophically, they anticipated the contemporary investigation into the very need to believe in the form of a polymorphous experience of love, excessive and inescapable.
Among the figures who illustrated these various currents and left a profound mark on European culture, I would underline—as does Teresa, my guide in this research—the “modern” devotion of the Flemish school, especially the lovelorn Jan van Ruysbroek36 and the great poetess Hadewijch of Antwerp;37 but above all the Rhenish mystics, first among them Meister Eckhart, the “unborn” (ungeboren), who begged God to leave him “free of God.” A “deep calling unto deep,”38 “free of all things,” “creating emptiness,” the soul “begets God from within itself, where it has the color of God; there is the image of God.” The soul of the “nobleman” is, according to Eckhart, negative as much as unitive; a supreme Intellect, but also a superessential Nothingness.39 It reaches the mystical state in Gelassenheit, the “abandonment” sung by Angelus Silesius in his The Cherubic Pilgrim,40 after Henry Suso41 and John Tauler,42 Eckhart’s direct continuators, had managed to smuggle his message as far as Nicholas Krebs of Cusa43 and into the stream of “speculative” mysticism that culminates in Jakob Böhme.44
The mystical theology thus created, having fertilized Christianity with late classical thought and Neoplatonic techniques of spiritual purification, would furnish the whole vocabulary of German philosophy. “Here is what we were looking for!” exclaims Hegel45 upon reading parts of Eckhart’s sermons 12 and 52, while Schopenhauer writes that Buddha, Eckhart, and himself “teach substantially the same thing.” Heidegger, for his part, constantly abandoning himself to the “abandonment” of Silesius,46 modulates the analogia entis that enables the conception of Being and Nothingness.
Fanned by the Salamanca student, John of the Cross, did the Rheno-Flemish wind blow as far as Teresa of Avila? It takes nothing away from La Madre’s originality to admit that the answer is yes.
Indeed, women are the foremost architects of this new dwelling-place of the soul we call mystical experience: an erotic, lethal escalation propels them to the summit of excessus. In Hildegarde of Bingen, this takes the form of a fabulous anatomical perception of her own body.47 It is enfeebled but sovereign in the cult of “nothing,” the apophatic thinking expressed by the “severed, immobile tongue” of Angela of Foligno.48 It inflames the anorexic Catherine of Siena with sacrificial devotion when she licks the pus from a cancerous breast:49 this fervent Dominican became the patron saint of Italy alongside Saint Francis of Assisi50 and Saint Thomas Aquinas. She was made a doctor of the Church by Pope Paul VI, at the same time as Teresa of Avila.
Why is there such a female infatuation with mysticism? Modern scholars have outdone one another in fascinated hypotheses. Is it because a woman’s whole body is a sexual organ, because desire scorches her skin, her eyes, her ears, her tongue, her
clitoris, her vagina, and her anus alike, and all her senses sweep her toward the object of her desire while he, like the Beloved in the Song of Songs, is always eluding her, a fleeing spouse or hidden God, absent, invisible, imaginary, unimaginable? If a woman’s whole body is a sexual organ, it can just as thoroughly repress desire to the point of sickness or vacate it into daydreams, words, sublimity.
The reasoned Protestant faith was quick to pour scorn on such deviations: “Visionen will ich nicht!” declared Luther.51 But the Golden Age Spanish Illuminati did not hesitate to draw on reformed humanism, and the Counter-Reformation seeded in its turn a new flowering of mysticism.
While reformed congregations put the accent on Scripture and the charitable vocation of a Christian community whose moral rigor was intended to quell and resorb the excesses of the desiring body, the Catholics, whose resistance to this formula was empowered by the Counter-Reformation, strove to make the secluded meanders of faith plain to see within the actual space of the Church—to infiltrate the corpus mysticum via the corpus verum.52 From then on, the more modulated meaning of the word mystic exhibited itself with forceful brilliance: it no longer denoted an inaccessible concealment, but beckoned what is concealed to come forth; it summoned the torments of flesh and spirit to emerge into the light and to seduce us. The corpus verum—Christ’s Passion, of which the subject partakes—was no longer a protected secret. By the grace of the mystics and of the Church that consecrated them, the seduction became universal.53 Such was the context of Teresa’s experience.
This mutation would unfold through a long and patient labor of theology, ritual, and aesthetics, tending to invent an ecclesial mystical body to link the present of the ecclesial institution (the hierarchy) to its history (textual, scriptural), but also to couple the boundless intimacy of mystical experiences to the visibility of religious society. The hearing of confession had already broken down some social opaqueness. The elevation of the Host accompanied by its observed consumption made a spectacle of the sacramental body itself, exhibiting the mystery in public. All this contributed to manufacturing the paradox of a transparent intimate body. Private life was “individualized” by highly customized “spiritual guidance” and other “confidential” dialogues, leading to the dissemination of “Exemplary Lives” or “Exercises” for the edification of a fascinated populace. A radical transformation took place via this process of visualization of the sacred, which today we might call the mediatization of the sacred, in and through the new conception of the Church promoted by the third54 and fourth Lateran councils55 and given a radical twist by the Council of Trent56 and the ensuing Counter-Reformation. Even prior to that, however, as the hidden became progressively “mediatized,” so the new mysticism became “epiphanic”: the corpus mysticum would be a placing in common, a transparent solidarity with the wretchedness of the “exiled” creatures that we are, and beyond: “Omnes…habebant omnia communia” (All the faithful together place everything in common).
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