Viewed from the current perspective of mysticism studies, what is especially interesting about Anne Carson’s libretto is the way in which the “mystical element,” as an extemporaneous category, showcases the survival of ways of “speaking of God” across centuries and places. It is the freedom with which the poet or artist produces their work that makes it possible to create new contexts of meaning – without losing those of each historical or cultural moment, or of each language and territory – in a forward and backward movement that runs through the history of culture and human spirit. The freedom with which the “mystical element” is transferred is all the more remarkable in our present time, especially in the West, where a post-secular worldview redefines secularization as just another myth of modernity. It is true that in this new phase, mystical and magical elements are sometimes difficult to distinguish from one another, attesting not only to the complexity of the religious traditions with which these phenomena are normally associated, but also highlights the socio-political tensions and conflicts of today’s societies, in the East as much as in the West.

It is precisely the experience of post-secularization that has favored not only the appearance of works such as Carson’s, but our ability to read them in a context that is not explicitly religious, a scenario that might have impeded the resignification of the “mystical element.” We should bear in mind that throughout the twentieth century many non-denominational artists have produced works of art, even with cultic functions in commissions for temples and churches, without adhering to specific religious criteria and languages. This was the case of architects such as Mies van der Rohe or artists such as Mark Rothko and, more recently, Pierre Soulages. This is not the place for a discussion of the category of the sacred as linked, or not, to the culturally religious. In any case, any resignification of classical categories in this field – such as the one our project proposes – requires in-depth study of the contexts in which these categories were born and used.

Almost thirty years ago, I undertook to translate into Spanish some German sermons and treatises by Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), a German Dominican theologian and key figure in medieval spirituality, whose impact on contemporary thought has become a growing source of interest among scholars. For my critical edition and translation, I chose the title: “The Fruit of Nothingness”, which I consider one of the most unique conceptual coinages of his oeuvre. Eckhart, who combined the activity of spiritual guide with teaching at the University of Paris, preached and wrote in Latin and German. While the Latin work, unfinished, was conceived mainly for academic use, preaching in the vernacular played a fundamental role in his pastoral and ecclesial activity. The uses of language – an expression that takes us back to Wittgenstein – is a central issue in the birth of Western mysticism. With the increasing use of vernacular languages in religious literature, especially among groups of beguines, a phenomenon witnessed in different regions of medieval Europe from the end of the twelfth century, a new type of religious experience and a new mode of mystical theology emerged in the vernacular – what Bernhard McGinn calls “vernacular theology” – whose conceptual, poetic and literary formulations acted as a countermodel to scholastic theology and the literary modes of treatise, disputes and commentaries. From the perspective of a history of ideas and culture, it can be said that this type of literature, which is more intimate and expresses itself mainly in the first person, already constitutes a first conception of Western subjectivity and, in a certain way, announces a modernity that was a few centuries ahead of the Protestant Reformation.

One of the key insights I’d like to draw from this example is that mysticism, especially in the context of Christian theology, is a phenomenon of language. “The word has great power,” said Eckhart, expressing at the same time the transforming power of the divine logos and the mediating faculty of human language: a “means of communication” (Kommunikationsmittel), as Alois Haas called it, referring to the activity of the preacher. For this reason, the study of the incipient forms of linguistic expression (the creation of neologisms in vernacular) has been a rich source of inspiration for thinkers such as Heidegger or Derrida, who saw in Meister Eckhart and Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler) something more than privileged moments of mystical theology, looking rather for speculative formulations that define a critical moment of thought. Tracing how the concepts of medieval mysticism are transmitted in modern and contemporary thought, taking into account the richness of the different translations in European languages, I came across a concept that immediately caught my attention: “countermovement” (Gegenbewegung). The term appears in some notes by Martin Heidegger for a course he never taught on “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism” in the 1918/19 academic year. I have studied this subject in detail elsewhere, but in our project, ‘Countermovement,’ I am interested in emphasizing the concept’s double meaning: on the one hand, ‘countermovement’ can refer to a countercultural capacity in the context of the social movements of Medieval Europe (Beguines, Beghards), which acted from within the Orthodox theological and ecclesiastical tradition. Yet the concept also has a strong cognitive dimension insofar as it indicates a movement of reversal, turning or conversion of the spirit. I understand it as a concept with a compelling timeless or untimely dimension, since it refers to a type of experience that, in its double directional movement, strains the terms between a conception of ecstatic time and its historical and eschatological course.

We have chosen this fundamental concept as the impetus for reflection in our PRISM project, whose aim is to investigate its possible extension to other fields of knowledge that are interested in the mystical experience: the arts, literature, poetry and psychoanalysis, among others. It was Michel de Certeau’s pioneering studies on the mysticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but also in his philosophical and anthropological essays, which opened up research into fields of knowledge that came out of philology and theology. In our time, an interesting example of this opening is Julia Kristeva’s hybrid novel-essay, Thérèse mon amour (2008), in which the psychoanalyst weaves a discourse between the fictional and the erudite, which illuminates some of the major concepts of Castilian mysticism and specifically of the work of the great reformer of Castilian spirituality of the sixteenth century.

If we approach ‘countermovement’ in its structural dimension, it is easy to grasp the concept’s significance for our time: while, on the one hand, it alludes to a crisis in the history of all spiritual traditions (the crisis of conversion and the crisis of cultural/countercultural tensions), on the other, it invites us to review those same traditions from our present moment, understanding that their time, as St. Augustine said, is in a sense always present, both in the past and in the future.

Bibliography

Certeau, Michel de, La fable mystique, vol. I (Paris: Gallimard 1982), vol. II. (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).

Coles, Elizabeth Sarah, Anne Carson. The Glass Essayist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023).

Haas, Alois M., Wind des Absoluten. Mystische Weisheit der Postmoderne? (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 2023).

Vega, Amador, Sacrificio y creación en la pintura de Rothko (Madrid: Siruela, 2008).

Vega, Amador, & Coles, Elizabeth Sarah (trans.), “Philosophy at a Crossroads”, Angelaki. Journal of theoretical Humanities, 2025 (30: 2), 43-55.

Amador Vega is director of the Centre for Aesthetics, Religion, and Contemporary Culture and Professor of Aesthetics and Art Theory at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. He has held visiting professorships at the University of Chicago, the Université Saint Joseph in Beirut, and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and teaches regularly at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. Specific research areas include the theological turn in twentieth-century European philosophy, and western mysticism and its legacies in art and literature. He has curated several high-profile exhibitions, including ‘Ramon Llull: The Thinking Machine’ at Barcelona’s CCCB (2016), and ‘Dia-Logos: Ramon Llull and the Ars Combinatoria’ at the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media (2018) and the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2019). He is the author of numerous essays and books, including most recently: Dia-Logos: Ramon Llull’s Method of Thought and Artistic Practice (ed., with Peter Weibel and Siegfried Zielinski), Tentativas sobre el vacío. Ensayos de estética y religion, ‘The Armenia Archive. A Ramon Llull Project’ and Gozos mínimos. Comentario parcial al Libro de amigo y amado. He is Visiting Fellow at The Warburg Institute, University of London.

A common definition describes a miracle as an event that defies the laws of nature and is attributed to a supernatural agent. But in Islamic contexts, things are far less straightforward. There is no single word for miracle and no agreed definition. In Sufi traditions, miracles can be understood as signs of divine proximity, the result of a long process of spiritual discipline culminating in union with God. Yet they are also treated with caution. Many masters warn that miracles can become traps, sources of pride that distract disciples from the true goal of the path. The most valued miracle, some insist, is the ability to “revive dead hearts.” At the same time, miracles are deeply entangled in social and political life. They can legitimize authority and attract followers.

At the shrine of the great saint ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Gilani in Baghdad, rituals of bodily piercing were banned a few years ago, and several shaykhs denounce what they see as a dangerous drift toward spectacle and commercialization. In a highly competitive religious landscape, miracles appear as precious resources. They help establish legitimacy and construct religious identity. The debate over miracles is also a debate over who has the right to define Islam and to shape the forms it takes in contemporary society. As such, if the debates on miracles can take an obvious theological form, they might be more political in substance.

Paradoxically, while such practices are contested or stigmatized in their local context, they have also attracted the interest of Western researchers in (para)psychology and alternative medicine, who approach them as empirical phenomena to be studied, measured, and even replicated. In this shift, what is dismissed by some as superstition can be reinterpreted by others as evidence of unexplored human capacities. Dirbashas have thus been approached as cases of extreme pain modulation and rapid wound healing. Psychologists and physicians have attempted to measure physiological responses during these performances, interpreting them in terms of beliefs, expectation, and the role of ritual context in shaping bodily experience. In this perspective, what appears as a “miracle” becomes evidence of little-studied interactions between mind, body, and environment. These controversies actively produce new ways of thinking about the world. In the process, boundaries between science and religion become less fixed, giving rise to unexpected exchanges, reinterpretations, and even transformations of the actors involved -like one of the American psychologists, Howard Hall, who eventually converted to Islam and joined the Kasnazaniyya. Rather than a simple “break with nature,” the miracle here appears as a routinized practice, one that can circulate between religious settings, laboratories and public debate.

Social scientists, too, can be caught up in these debates. Fieldwork, I learned early on, can be unsettling in unexpected ways. During my very first fieldwork in Pakistan, in an interview in a Sufi shrine in Uch Sharif, a caretaker unexpectedly performed a healing ritual, blowing Quranic verses onto my hand after I had been stung several times by a wasp. The pain vanished instantly and I did not become swollen which, in my case, was all the more striking as I am allergic to wasp stings. A month later in Lahore with a Qadiri Sufi master called Chand Pir, a colleague and I were invited, without warning, to take part in yet another healing ritual. Under his guidance, we applied a white-hot knife to our tongues, repeating bismillah. We felt no pain, no burning. The shaykh even told us we had been granted the power to heal. The experience was deeply disorienting.

I later learned that such “trials by fire” exist in very different contexts, from Bedouin practices of truth-testing to Siberian shamanic traditions. But in that moment, several “truths” clashed. As an inexperienced researcher, I was trained to observe, to maintain distance, to interpret, convinced that the scientific framework I relied on did not coincide with the truth of the believer I was studying. But confronted with this challenge, refusing the ritual would have meant refusing trust, and retreating into the safety of skepticism. Accepting it meant stepping into a different regime of truth, one in which rational explanation seemed insufficient and where efficacy is experienced before being explained. Fieldwork, in such contexts, is as much about entering situations that challenge our very perception of reality as about gathering data on rituals or conflicts.

Looking back, this episode also highlighted what was at stake in the specific political situation I was studying at the time. My research focused on tensions between Pakistan’s Ministry of Religious Affairs and Sufi authorities marginalized by state reforms. By staging this “miracle,” the shaykh was demonstrating healing or thaumaturgical power and, in doing so, was making an argument. The experience itself became a form of evidence, offered to counter the state’s attempt to delegitimize “traditional” religious actors in the name of modernity. In that sense, the miracle functioned as a form of resistance from below, an embodied claim about authority, truth, and the limits of a purely materialist or modernist worldview imposed from above

What did I do with such experiences? What most of us tend to do when such events disturb our epistemological peace: I bracketed them out. And yet, they lingered as an unresolved enigma I would occasionally recount to colleagues, as a way of suggesting that perhaps our default rationalist and materialist framework is not only limited, but may also, in some sense, be unscientific, insofar as it discourages us from fully engaging with the complexity of the world.

Encounters with miracles, or with phenomena that seem to defy ordinary expectations, have led a number of anthropologists to question the limits of the materialist framework that continues to shape much of the social sciences. Rather than dismissing such experiences as illusion or superstition, some have suggested that they invite us to question the limits of our current ways of knowing reality. Even brief participation in such practices can blur established boundaries between belief, experience and knowledge.

I, too, felt this tension in my fieldwork, as these encounters disrupted many of my initial assumptions and made it difficult to maintain a strictly external position. Rather than resolving the tension, they forced me to rethink it. In my own work, this has led me to adopt a stance close to a form of “methodological theism” (Piette, 2003): not a commitment to the ontological reality of invisible forces, but a willingness to take seriously their presence as it is enacted in social situations. In practice, this means approaching unseen agents as participants in interaction, real for those involved, and therefore analytically significant, not as abstractions to be explained away.

Instead of asking whether miracles are “true” or “false,” the question becomes what to do with such experiences when they refuse to fit our usual ways of interpreting reality. In this sense, the study of “miracles” points to the ways in which the practices of mystical traditions force us to confront the limits of our own epistemological assumptions. It may even push us to reconsider what counts as real, and to acknowledge that reality may be deeper, more textured, and maybe less settled than our dominant frameworks allow us to believe.

Bibliography

Jordan David, “Sufism, subjectivity and parapsychology : refashioning the dirbāsha ritual among Sufis in modern Iraq”, Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Asiengesellschaft - Revue de la Société Suisse-Asie 75, no. 3 (28 November 2021): 831–58.

Hall, H., & Schwartz, G. E. (2004). “Rapid wound healing: A Sufi perspective”. Seminars in Integrative Medicine 2(3), 116-123. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sigm.2004.09.004

Hunter, Jack. “«Between Realness and Unrealness»: Anthropology, Parapsychology and the Ontology of Non-Ordinary Realities».” Diskus: Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion 17.2 (2015): 4-20.

Piette, Albert. Le fait religieux. Une théorie de la religion ordinaire, Paris, Economica, Coll. Études sociologiques, 2003.

Pinto, Paulo G. “The Sufi Ritual of Darb al-shish and the Ethnography of Religious Experience”. In Ethnographies of Islam: Ritual Performances and Everyday Practices, edited by Baudoin Dupret, Thomas Pierret, Paulo G. Pinto, and Kathryn Spellman-Poots, 62–70. Edinburgh University Press, 2012. doi:10.1515/ 9780748645510- 007.

Thomas, David. “Miracles in Islam”. In The Cambridge Companion to Miracles, edited by Graham H. Twelftree, 199– 215. Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Alix Philippon is an anthropologist and ethnographer whose work explores mysticism, religion, and power. An Associate Professor at Sciences Po Aix and co-director of the Master's program in Social Sciences of Politics, she specializes in Sufism and political Islam, with a particular focus on Pakistan and Iraq. Her research follows history, geography, and local studies, and asks how spiritual traditions shape public life, identity, and political imagination. She is the author of several books, including Sufism and Politics in Pakistan: The Barelwi Movement at a Time of ‘War Against Terrorism’ (Paris 2011) and In the Shadow of Shrines: Sufi traditions in Pakistan (Paris 2016), and her latest work examines the Qadiriyya Sufi order in contemporary Iraq.

Modern thought often imagines the self as a kind of sealed unit: autonomous, bounded, and self-grounding. This “monadic” model has shaped everything from political theory to psychology, as Ben Morgan articulated eloquently and compellingly in his 2012 monograph On Becoming God: Late Medieval Mysticism and the Modern Western Self. But the modern self comes at a cost. If the self is fundamentally closed, then any genuine encounter, with others, with the world, or with God, becomes philosophically puzzling. Indeed, the human person becomes isolated and individualized, and perhaps therefore at great risk of being objectified, commodified, and exploited.

Premodern mysticism, on the other hand, begins from a different premise: that the human being is, at its deepest level, open. The question is not how a closed self reaches out, but how an already relational being comes to recognize and deepen its participation in what transcends it. This approach is already evident in Augustine of Hippo. His famous exploration of memory and interiority does not lead to a self-enclosed subject, but to a paradox: God is both more inward than the self and infinitely beyond it. To enter into oneself, for Augustine, is therefore not to withdraw from relation, but to discover it at a deeper level. The “ground” of the soul is not a private core. It is a site of encounter. This insight is developed throughout the medieval tradition. Figures such as Hugh of Saint-Victor insist that the deepest point of the soul is also the highest, not because it is self-sufficient, but because it is most radically open to God. Interiority, in this sense, is not narcissistic. It is the condition for transcendence.

This relational ontology is inseparable from the concept of participation. To exist is already to share in something greater. The human person is not a closed substance but a dynamic orientation toward its source. Recent scholarship has sharpened this insight. In The Permeable Self, for example, Barbara Newman argues that medieval thinkers did not imagine the self as bounded in modern terms. Instead, the self was understood as porous, open to divine influence, shaped by relations, and capable of transformation. Whatever is personal must be conceived from this perspective as fundamentally interpersonal. Similarly, Rob Faesen, through his decades-long research into the Middle Dutch mystics, has shown how mystical anthropology presupposes a fundamentally relational structure. The self is not first an isolated subject that then enters into relation; it is constituted as, in, and through relation. This means that receptivity is not secondary, it is fundamental. The highest point of the soul – the apex mentis, the “spark”, the ground – is precisely the point at which the self is most open, most permeable, most capable of participation.

But there is another modern assumption that deserves scrutiny: the idea that mystics themselves are isolated individuals, producing texts that express their private inner experiences or what Bernard McGinn has taught us to call consciousness. This picture of the isolated mystic has become increasingly untenable. Not only do mystical authors operate within intricate literary webs that draw on expansive intertextual repositories of sacred and literary traditions, but their texts are shaped and mediated by the networks and communities of which they are constitutive parts.

With respect to the first point, mystical authors are formed through a continuous dialogue between themselves and the broader cultural and theological landscapes in which they write, and their texts are deeply embedded within networks of meanings drawn from scripture, theological discourse, and earlier mystical works. The richness of these texts lies in their ability to evoke layers of symbolic resonance, each utterance carrying the weight of centuries of theological interpretation, biblical exegesis, and mystical reflection. Mystical authors engage in complex processes of textual adaptation and transformation. They recontextualize familiar symbols, but in doing so, they infuse them with new meanings and subtle shifts that reflect their own context and perspective. In this sense, mystical authors engage in literary and theological bricolage, blending familiar metaphors from scripture with their own spiritual insights to create a language that is both rooted in tradition and distinctively personal. Authors thus function as both conservator and creator, reworking and adapting inherited imagery to form a vivid tapestry that reflects the depths of spiritual insight and the elusive and ineffable nature of divine union.

But recent work by scholars such as Racha Kirakosian or Patricia Stoop has demonstrated that the mystical texts that have come down to us are in fact themselves also the product of collaborative, layered, and ongoing processes of composition. In her study of the transmission of the visions of Gertrude of Helfta, Kirakosian shows that these texts emerge from complex networks of scribes, translators, and communities. Rather than fixed works authored by a single individual, they are dynamic textualities: continuously rewritten, adapted, and reinterpreted. Manuscript culture, as she emphasizes, does not preserve stable originals but generates multiple, equally meaningful versions shaped by their communities of reception. Authorship itself is not a matter of individual originality but of participation in a living tradition. Writing is a communal act, embedded in practices of devotion, education, and transmission. This has far-reaching implications. It means that the mystical “voice” we encounter is not singular. It is mediated, refracted, and co-produced. The mystic is never alone, either with respect to the transcendent or with respect to writing. The relational ontology of the soul is mirrored in the relational ontology of the text.

This convergence becomes particularly striking in the work of John of Ruusbroec. His account of the “ground” (grond) of the soul as a site of divine indwelling is not merely an abstract anthropology. It is embedded in a broader spiritual culture in which texts, communities, and practices all participate in the same relational reality. For Ruusbroec, the deepest unity of the soul is not something the individual possesses in isolation. It is a participation in the divine life that sustains all beings. The soul – all souls – “hang(s)” in God, and its faculties find their fulfilment in returning to this ground. But this return is never purely individual. It is mediated by language, tradition, and community. The very concepts Ruusbroec uses are inherited, transformed, and transmitted within a shared intellectual and spiritual world. And one might argue that to read Ruusbroec, to take only one example, is already in some way to participate in that world.

What emerges from all this is a double critique of modern assumptions. First, the self is not a monad. It is fundamentally relational: open to what transcends it, constituted by participation, and most fully itself in communion. Second, the mystic is not an isolated genius. Mystical texts are not private expressions but communal artifacts: produced, transmitted, and transformed within networks of relation. These two insights belong together. A relational anthropology is mirrored in a relational textuality.

Why should this matter today? Because we continue to live with the consequences of imagining ourselves as isolated, both as individuals and as thinkers. In contrast, premodern mysticism offers a vision in which the self is a threshold, not a container, knowledge is a form of participation, not individualized insight, texts are living processes, not fixed objects, and community is the most fundamental medium of meaning, not an optional, secondary affair. In this light, the study of mysticism is not escapist. It is diagnostic. It reveals something about the presuppositions that have become ‘natural’ to modern subjects and about the assumptions we have perhaps forgotten we are making. This in turn points us to an alternative: a way of understanding ourselves not as isolated monads but as beings whose deepest identity is found in relation, not only to God, but to one another, and even to the traditions that continue to speak through us.

John Arblaster, Associate Professor at the University of Antwerp and Director of the Ruusbroec Institute, is a scholar of Christian mysticism, specializing in the medieval and early modern mystical traditions of the Low Countries. His work focuses on figures such as John of Ruusbroec, women mystics, and the doctrine of deification (theosis) in the Christian tradition. He is the co-editor of A Companion to John of Ruusbroec and Mystical Anthropology: Authors from the Low Countries, and has written widely on the history, theology, and contemporary relevance of mystical experience.

On June 15th, Prof. John Arblaster (Ruusbroec Institute, Antwerpen) will explore the teachings of Gertrud of Helfta and Jan van Ruusbroec on how the Self can learn to decenter itself and recenter on God. Read his contribution on June 15th!

In order to understand human emotion, from the Christian perspective we may begin with the emotions of God. There are no set emotional relationships of the soul and God in Christianity, though we do have some discussion of major religious emotions. The most frequently mentioned emotion is agape, divine love shown between God and mankind. It is described as God’s love of mankind (John 3:16; Romans 8:38-39), as human love towards God (John 13:34-35), and between human beings (1 John 3:16). It is the most mystical form of love, dealing directly with the soul and God. As Jesus instructs his disciples: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).

C.S. Lewis describes three other types of love found in the Bible: storge (family love), philia or phileo (friendship), and eros (erotic love, as between man and wife in Proverbs, and the king and his bride in the Song of Solomon). All of these can be understood as religious emotions, though agape would be the most directly mystical.

However, in many strands of modern Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity, mystical love is understood in a different way. It is being filled by the presence of the Holy Spirit, but in this case the Holy Spirit is not the comforter, the spirit of love and peace. It is the spirit of war and violence.

In the New Testament, before his arrest Jesus comforted his disciples with the promise of the Holy Spirit. He said, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor to be with you forever—the Spirit of truth” (John 14:16-17, NIV). “Counselor” was translated from parakletos, a Greek word meaning advocate, helper, or comforter. The Spirit would come to baptize people, and bring a set of spiritual gifts, according to Corinthians 12:8-10: Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Healing, Miracles, Prophecy, Discerning spirits, Tongues, and Interpreting Tongues. The Holy Spirit is considered to be a person (one of three in the Trinity) and his fruit is love and peace, joy, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).

However, in many modern groups, the understanding of the Holy Spirit has changed, and the understanding of a mystical relationship with it has also changed. In groups following the Prosperity Gospel, spread through televangelism and many megachurches, the blessings of the Holy Spirit are shown through wealth. Thus, rich people are mystically united with God through the blessings of the Holy Spirit. Material and especially financial success is seen as evidence of divine grace or favor. This belief suggests that Christians should exercise dominion over the material objects around them, with Biblical lines about ‘abundant life’ and ‘blessings’ having a directly materialist interpretation. Poverty and illness are curses, while vanity is reasonable. Greed becomes a religious emotion, for it is desire for God’s blessings, increased by ‘miracle oil’ and ‘positive confession’ which let God know exactly what the Christian needs. After all, Jesus is believed to have died on the cross to save people from poverty.

A ritual associated with the Holy Spirit is the process of anointing, usually with oil. The issue of anointing becomes problematic in the more militant strains of charismatic thought. The concept of anointing comes from the Hebrew Bible, in which prophets, priests, and kings were blessed by the ruach Elohim, later interpreted by Christian theologians as the Greek pneuma, the Christian Holy Spirit. But the ritual has been appropriated in many modern groups for blessing violent thoughts and actions. Such anointings may be corporate or individual, with many subtypes. For instance, the Mimshach anointing will cause everything one touches to increase, and the anointed one will experience greater levels of success, material gain, health, and power. But the most important anointing is about those who fight demonic evil.

From this perspective, the Holy Spirit is not primarily about love and salvation, it is about conflict and war. In early Christianity, we saw Inquisitions and Crusades, but these were not mystical events. They were about obedience to authorities, both religious and secular. But in many charismatic groups, members are mystically transformed into the ‘Sword of God,’ and the Holy Spirit fills them not with love but rather hatred of enemies understood as demonic. Such ‘warriors for Christ’ are filled with holy hatred and the desire to destroy, wearing supernatural armor and using Biblical lines as paranormal weapons in the Army of God.

This spiritual warfare is particularly visible in the Deliverance Ministries, in which members identify with Jesus casting out demons and become empowered by the Holy Spirit, which allows them to see and hear demons and identify them, as well as cast them out of people and objects. Demons may infest or oppress the person, as well as possess him or her, and it is through supernatural warfare that they are removed. The modern ‘third-wave charismatic movement’ advocates for a militarized style of spiritual warfare to be enacted by “anointed prayer warriors,” and has given rise to spiritual warfare boot camps in which recruits are trained as soldiers to do battle against demonic influence. For soldiers, compassion towards enemies is a bad thing, and condemnation of ‘toxic empathy’ makes sense in such situations. Kindness is believed to make people weak.

This militarization becomes important because demons are believed to be hiding everywhere- in houses, cars, games, books, and films, among other places. Exorcisms chase these demons away, but the exorcist must be filled with the Holy Spirit for the process to work. Anointing is a ritual way to become possessed by the Holy Spirit, to transform the ordinary person into a Soldier of God, a warrior chasing demons out of unlikely places. Violence is not limited to a battlefield, as the whole earth is a battlefield. (Note: during field research, an exorcist volunteered to cure my backache by chasing my backache demon out of every finger and toe. By the end, the demon was supposed to be gone, but the backache sadly remained).

Thus, we have an alternative understanding of mystical possession by the Holy Spirit, not as the spirit of peace, but rather as the spirit of war. In these forms of modern Christianity, mystical theology is a problem. In the Prosperity Gospel, the soul desires the blessings of God, specifically those of wealth, and desiring such blessings is a good thing. Thus, mystical greed is good. Wealthy people are a later version of the Calvinist Elect, though while Calvin emphasized modesty and humility for the Elect, this gospel is about conspicuous consumption. As wealth is a sign of God’s blessing and agreement, pastors can preach obedience to wealthy but corrupt politicians, for God is on their side. Immorality does not count for those who are Chosen.

In the Deliverance groups, mystical love mixes with mystical hatred. It shows a return to some early dualistic models of Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism, where God created the world, but the world was not good- for matter was full of demons. Being filled with the Holy Spirit prepared the person for war, and the Holy Spirit reveals itself through righteous anger and hatred of the demonic and unsaved; the person is ‘infilled’ by the Holy Spirit baptism. From this perspective, the major energies within the processions of the Holy Trinity (which reflect the Holy Spirit as the relational love between the three Persons of the Trinity, united by grace) are neither creative nor loving, but rather destructive.

Both of these are challenges for Christian mystical theology, when the Trinitarian energies become both materialist and harmful. Do we now have a Trinity marked by a shadow side of violence and warfare? Or even a separate shadow Trinity, with its processions of darkness rather than light? In this situation, God the Father is more concerned with killing Egyptians and Babylonians than creating the world, while God the Son has his words ignored in favor of his overturning tables at the Jerusalem Temple, and God the Holy Spirit inspires souls to conflict and strife.

Very little work on the nature of the Trinity has been done in the modern field of Christian mystical theology. But if charismatic Christians today see themselves as channeling the energy of God, they need to have some understanding of what it is that they are channeling. Is mystical union with the Holy Spirit an experience of love or hatred? Should its presence be shown through compassion or spiritual warfare? Should we have an Army of God that follows the wealthy and powerful rather than the kind and merciful? When we see modern Christian possession by hatred and war rather than peace, perhaps we need to look back to medieval ideas of demonic possession and the ways that people learn to distinguish between good and evil. When people spend too long thinking of an enemy, they may start to resemble him or her.

Is empathy a bad thing? As a recent site notes: “Compassion warms Satan’s heart.” But compassion cannot be separated from the New Testament, from the stories of the Good Samaritan, the rich man Lazarus, and the Sermon on the Mount. Perhaps if we focused less on the demons in others, we might see their better angels.

Prof. June McDaniel is Professor Emerita in the History of Religions at the Department of Religious Studies, College of Charleston. She holds an Master of Theological Studies from Emory University and a PhD in History of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her research areas are mysticism, religions of India, psychology of religion, women and religion, and ritual studies. She obtained grants from the American Institute of Indian Studies and was a Fulbright Senior Research Scholar. She served as chair of the Mysticism Group of the American Academy of Religion for twenty years and co-founded the AAR Anthropology of Religion Group. She is the author of three books on India, a co-edited volume on mysticism, and numerous articles.

The Quran provides an image of such a state. In a somewhat gnostic turn, the Quran asks us, at Q 7:172, to bring to mind a time before creation, when we were all gathered peacefully together before the divine being who presented the initial question to all human spirits who would ever exist: Am I not your Lord? The answer from us all was immediate and joyous: Yes indeed! (balā). The Quran continues that this exchange occurred in order to preempt any future protests from the Children of Adam (all humanity), especially on the Day of Judgment (yawm al-qiyāma), that the reason we had fallen short was because we were unaware of the reality, and the commitment contracted to it, of that day. In Islam, the event is referred to as “The Day of the Covenant (yawm al-mīthāq)”, or “The Day of ‘Am I Not?’ (yawm-i alast)”. This event is the beginning, analogous perhaps to the more scientistic idea of “big bang”, when time, history, and consciousness were put into operation. It helps us contextualize the Quranic insistence that the book can be understood only by those who believe in the Unseen (Q 2:3). It occurred in the realm of the invisible (al-ghayb) and so the relation to it may be described as “mystical”. But this teaching is also charged with existential, noetic, cosmogonic, metaphysical and gnostic implications.[1]

As is well-known, there is in Islam no notion of original sin. But there is a cognate critique of human foible, misdeed and moral lapse which emerges from the Quranic verbal icon of the Day of the Covenant. This cognate explanation refuses to accept that human beings were born sinful. Rather, they were born as pure created beings, according to the divine creativity (fiṭra) of God, the Creator (Q 30:30). The closest Islam can come to something like original sin is to recognize that human beings are prone to forgetfulness, as in their forgetting their original covenant with God on that glorious day mentioned at Q 7:172.

The widespread Sufi practice of dhikr or zekr “remembrance” or “calling to mind” is aimed squarely at such forgetfulness. Forgetting the Day of the Covenant not only obscures the true relation between human and God, it also obscures the original and formative, “most real”, relation obtaining amongst humans on the Day of the Covenant when all were assembled in peace and harmony in the worship of your Lord (rabbikum). The event represents an eternal now or eternal moment which circulates throughout the realm of creation, Islam, the minds of Muslims and the souls of all human beings, even if they are unaware of it. But it is not only the so-called Sufi ritual of dhikr which calls the Day of the Covenant to mind. This also happens through the common, yet intense and pervasive rich prayer culture of Islam inculcated by the Quran, which is also known as al-Dhikr, “The Remembrance.” It may also be brought to mind, dramatically, whenever people congregate.

Secrecy has a strong semantic presence in the word mysticism. While the Islamic tradition is well known for the remarkable growth of a “mystical” culture, typically associated with the word Sufi, it is the case that in the Quran or the tradition there is no word which may be understood in a cognate fashion implying secrecy as a “sacramental” component of spiritual elitism. That is to say, Islam envisions no knowledge or teaching that is not accessible to all humanity, even if not every human has (yet) acquired it. As the Quran says, the only difference between humans is that some know and some do not: How can those who know be equal to those who do not know? (Q 39:9).

Perhaps the closest the Quran comes to expressing what we might call the charisma of hiddenness or secret knowledge is when it insists that It is a book revealed only for those who have faith in the Unseen (al-ghayb, Q 2:3, as above) – a realm that cannot be approached through the senses. The notion of secrecy and elitism embedded in the primary Greek etymon for the word mystic, μύω, myo “I conceal,” “to close” e.g. the eyes or the mouth, or “to initiate,” may be apposite, but in a restricted sense.

The theme of the unknowableness of God is one of the central presuppositions of the Quran and Islam and may be thought historically connected to the widespread idolatry and polytheism which the prophet Muhammad was called upon to correct. In the Islamic context, the primary, not to say primordial, “Unseen” is, therefore, none other than God. God is, of course, not only physically invisible but also conceptually, infinitely and eternally “invisible”: Nothing is like even his likeness (Q 42:11). God is unknowable, indescribable. Here, then, the closing of the eyes or the mouth are a result of the inability to express that which is ineffable. It is not kept secret because the believers have been ordered into silence but because the truth they have experienced is beyond words.

The epistemological tension is heightened when considered in the context of the dozens of names, attributes and epithets for God throughout the Quran, from beginning to end. This, along with God’s ineffability, is also a characteristic feature of the Quran. So, we encounter numerous attributes and names, for example the All-Merciful, the Just, the Almighty, the Patient, the Preserver, the Kind, the Subtle. The apophatic God of the Quran has generated what has been most congenially referred to as a new discourse of apophasis, one in which negativity is replaced by noetic tension. Islam produced a new language of mystical spirituality.[2]

This aporetic discourse is generative of an open-ended spirituality and mystical sensibility and has given rise to a system of apophatic metaphoricity.[3] The contemplation of the reality of humanity, a concept which is uniquely present in a distinct discourse throughout the Quran, calls for a similar aporia. The parable or myth of the Day of the Covenant, which marks the beginning of time, history and consciousness, including the consciousness of what it means to be human, indicates that humankind and the divine share in their respective knowability and unknowability. This “mystico-historical” event establishes, in one gesture, the oneness of God, the oneness of religion and the oneness of humanity. It also casts important light on the idea of oneness which is thus shifted from numerical singleness to a dynamic cosmology of deep interconnectedness.

This is a quintessentially important element of what might be construed as Muslim soul formation, which would thus seem to qualify as profoundly mystical. In the unfolding of Islamic mysticism, we encounter a series of words to do with knowing, learning, teaching and growing. The word secret does occur in the Quran but not in the context of “secret knowledge”, rather it refers to people who do good deeds (or bad) but keep it secret, or it refers to the “secret” part of the human being, the non-public region, frequently identified as the soul, the inner reality of the human being. If we wish to use the word mystic in our discussion of Islam it is best to avoid identifying it too restrictively with secrets of initiation. Indeed, it emerges from the Quranic teaching about the primordial Day of the Covenant, that mysticism is a universal condition and dimension of humanity to all of whom mystic insight and experience is equally accessible. One might even offer that the mystical is part of the architecture of Islamic orthodoxy except that the word orthodoxy is quite unusable in the case of Islam.

The knowledge involved is, by any measure, a mystical knowledge. The Day of the Covenant is not discoverable through science as normally understood. Rather it derives from a human experience of intimacy in the realm of the Unseen. Just as God is infinitely remote and unknowable (Q 42:11; Q 112) “He” is also infinitely close, immediate and intimate (Q 50:16). This opens the reader/believer to an experience that is at bottom exquisitely ineffable even if the mythic scenario in the Quran is told with normal words in a normal language. The event is beyond conceptualization, but the Quran speaks of it through figurative language, a language very difficult – but not impossible - to capture in translation.

While mysticism commonly entails secrecy or esoteric practices, the way the Quran negotiates these powerful spiritual realities stands as highly original and inspiring. All people of the Quran take Q 7:172 as divine truth, however received. In this sense, all Muslims are mystics, believing in the Unseen. But as the widely-quoted hadith has insisted: “The roads to God are as numerous as the breaths of the creatures (inna aṭ-ṭuruq ilā Allāh bi-‘adad anfās al-khalā’iq).” The image of a humanity united in peace, love and mutual recognition is of supreme value, especially these days. This image, whether understood as mystical, existential, doctrinal, or even metaphorical, is a precious gift to the world.

Todd Lawson is a scholar of Islamic thought and Professor Emeritus of Islamic Studies at the University of Toronto, known for his contributions to the study of the Qur’an, Shi‘i Islam, and the Baha’i faith. Lawson’s research focuses on Qur’anic hermeneutics, scriptural interpretation, and the intellectual history of early and medieval Islam. He has written extensively on messianism, symbolism, and the role of sacred texts in shaping religious identity. His notable works include The Crucifixion and the Qur’an and Gnostic Apocalypse and Islam, which explore complex theological and literary dimensions of Islamic thought. Lawson is widely recognized for his interdisciplinary approach, combining philology, history, and literary analysis to deepen understanding of Islamic traditions and their broader cultural and spiritual significance.

Select Bibliography

Alfraaz Adam Mulji, https://www.sacredweb.com/metaphysics/de-sanctitate-abscondita/

Böwering, Gerhard. The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qur’ānic Hermeneutics of the Ṣūfī Sahl At-Tustarī (d. 283/896). De Gruyter, 1980.

Corbin, Henry. En Islam Iranien: Aspects Spirituels et Philosophiques. 4 vols. Gallimard, 1971.

Jaffer, Tariq. “Is There Covenant Theology in Islam?” In Islamic Studies Today: Essays in Honor of Andrew Rippin, edited by Majid Daneshgar and Walid A. Saleh. Brill, 2017.

Kadi, Wadad. The Primordial Covenant and Human History in the Qur’ān. Edited by Ramzi Baalbaki. The Margaret Weyerhaeuser Jewett Chair of Arabic Occasional Papers. American University of Beirut, 2006.

Lawson, Todd. “In the Beginning Was Metaphor: Henry Corbin and the Quran.” In New Perspectives on Henry Corbin, edited by Hadi Fakhoury. Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-91627-4_4.

Lawson, Todd. “Metaphorical Literalism and the Poetics of Reality: Aḥmad Aḥsāʾī, Figuration and the World of Images.” In Post-Eurocentric Poetics: New Approaches from Arabic, Persian and Turkic Literary Theory, edited by Hany Rashwan, Rebecca Ruth Gould, and Nasrin Askari. Proceedings of the British Academy. Oxford University Press & British Academy, 2024.

Lumbard, Joseph E. B. “Covenant and Covenants in the Qur’an.” Journal of Qur’anic Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2015.0193.

Massignon, Louis. “Le ‘Jour Du Covenant’ (Yawm al-Mīthāq).” Oriens 15 (1962): 86–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/1579840.

Sells, Michael Anthony. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Shah-Kazemi, Reza. The Other in the Light of the One: The Universality of the Qur’ān and Interfaith Dialogue. 1st ed. Cambridge UK: Islamic Texts Society, 2006 esp. pp. 76-98.

[1] Lawson, Bowering, Kadi.

[2] Sells.

[3] Lawson, Heath, Corbin.

Before the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE, the Middle East and North Africa had been home to several highly developed and sophisticated traditions of asceticism and mysticism. Judaism was one such tradition. More prominent in this respect was Christianity that had inherited world-renouncing and mystical elements not only from Judaism but also from the religions and philosophical movements of the Greco-Roman world, especially the Cynics, Stoics and Neoplatonists. Humans are naturally inclined to imitate or borrow ideas, technologies, and practices from one another. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that some pious members of the early Muslim community found something attractive in the behavior and beliefs of the Christian monks and desert hermits of Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Mesopotamia—the lands now ruled by the Arab-Islamic state (caliphate). Later, such devout Muslims came to be known as “Sufis,” (“wool people” or “wearers of wool”) and the movement they initiated “Sufism.” They praised and occasionally imitated the devout behavior of Eastern Christian monks whom they encountered in their daily life and travels. What prompted early Muslims to adopt some the ascetic-mystical beliefs and practices of their Christian neighbors remains a mystery. Trying to unravel it, twentieth-century Western scholars of Islam (Islamologists) have proposed several hypotheses.

The influential American historian Marshall Hodgson (1922–1968) attributed the spread of ascetic-mystical ideals among some early Muslims to their temperamental inclinations. In his view, ascetically and mystically inclined people had to be accommodated within the ambit of Islam, or to be “lost” to other religions, in particular Christianity with its powerful tradition of moral-ethical introspection and otherworldly orientation. In Hodgson’s view, this accommodation occurred through the introduction of Sufi teachings and practices that mirrored the ethical and philosophical principles and behaviors found in other Middle Eastern religions.

The British historian of early Middle Eastern Christianity and Islam, Margaret Smith (1884–1970), offered a different explanation. A devout Christian, she argued that ascetic and mystical ideals were borrowed by some pious Muslims from their Christian neighbors. She allotted a special role in this process to Christian wives of the Arab-Muslim conquerors. Raised in Christianity, they inculcated in their children respect for “the habits of life of the Christian solitaries and monks.” Hence the desire of some pious Muslims to imitate the beliefs and practices of the Christian monks.

Other Western scholars of Sufism, especially Marijan Molé (1924–1963), emphasized the decisive role of the socioeconomic conditions that prevailed in the early Muslim state after the conquest. Characterized by the inevitable inequities of a rigidly stratified agrarian society, they were further aggravated by the rapaciousness and impiousness of the Muslim ruling elite. Consequently, some disaffected Muslims reoriented themselves to the life of the spirit, withdrew from the corrupt and corruptive society and adopted self-imposed strictures, introspection and mystical meditation. The ubiquitous presence of Christian monasteries and itinerant monks in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia made contacts between such pious Muslims and Christian devotees unavoidable. The hypotheses proposed by Smith and Molé imply that denying such contacts ignores not just historical facts but also the natural human propensity to imitate one another.

While such explanations of Sufism’s origins seem plausible, they were rejected by both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars of Islamic asceticism and mysticism. The reason for this rejection is primarily ideological. Admitting foreign, especially Christian, influences on the ascetic-mystical trends in early Islam could be easily construed as questioning Islam’s self-sufficiency and ability to develop the “vaulted spiritually” and “sophisticated mystical metaphysics” that Sufi Islam is commonly seen as representing. Unsurprisingly, both Muslim and non-Muslim advocates of Sufism have found suggestions about its “foreign roots,” in this case, Christian, incompatible with “the majesty that was Islam” during its formative and “golden” ages.

The opposing view, namely, that Sufism has organically emerged from the foundational sources of Islam, was advanced by the French Islamologist Louis Massignon (1883–1962) who argued that “The Qur’an, through constant recitation, meditation, and practice, is the source of Islamic mysticism, at its beginning and throughout its growth.” However, Massignon’s statement sounds more rhetorical than factual, and his own investigations seem to have contradicted it. Nevertheless, his insistence on Sufism’s “Qur’anic roots” has caught on and continues to be used in the debates around Sufism’s origins.

What Massignon was right about is the centrality of the Qur’an to the Muslim intellectual and spiritual tradition generally and Sufi Islam in particular. However, the fact that Sufi beliefs and practices were and still are couched in Qur’anic terminology does not automatically imply that they take provenance in the Qur’an alone. On the contrary, as a Western scholar has aptly remarked, “If the Qur’an is the ground of [Islamic] mysticism, then Qur’anic piety itself builds, in important ways, on Christian foundations,” albeit, one must add, thoroughly adapted to the Qur’an’s overall worldview. Qur’anic references to monks and their values and way of life (Q 57:27) indicate that Christian monasticism was already part of the Qur’anic narrative. The scriptural evidence concerning monasticism being ambivalent, there is little wonder that early Muslims paid close attention to the monks’ beliefs and practices to determine what was or was not proper and acceptable. For cross-cultural comparison, the whole project of “the Jesus movement” consisted in recasting the Jewish tradition according to the precepts and demands of the new cult.

If we abstract ourselves from the ideological underpinnings of the debate over the origins of Sufism, we must acknowledge the improbability of the idea that early Islam, whose sources were so deeply rooted in the pre-Islamic belief systems of the Mediterranean region, could have remained immune from ascetic-mystical aspects of Eastern Christianity. The same is true of Judaic, Neoplatonic, and Manichean elements permeating Mediterranean cultures.

This said, the debt that (proto-)Sufism owes to the beliefs and practices of its ascetic-mystical precursors can indeed be cited by Sufism’s opponents to undermine its credibility in the eyes of Muslim communities worldwide. Therefore, the unwitting or deliberate obfuscation of the obvious by today’s Islamologists (which occasionally amounts to self-censure) is driven primarily by apologetic considerations. The only way to achieve a modicum of objectivity in this matter is for scholars of Sufism to disengage from the pro- or contra-Sufism polemical agenda. To what extent is this possible in practice is a different question.

Again, for comparison, one may ask whether Christianity’s dependence on Judaism for its teachings and forms of worship in any way diminishes its stature as a sophisticated and freestanding intellectual and spiritual endeavor? More pertinent still, does the acceptance of some Manichean ideas (for example, the strict separation of spirit and matter and the notion of body as a vessel of vices) by the early medieval monks of Mesopotamia and Syria render them simple epigones of Mani and thus less authentically Christian? If the answer is “no,” then why not to apply the same logic to Islam in general and (proto-)Sufism in particular? Seen from this vantage point, the ongoing debates over the Islamic or non-Islamic roots of ascetical and mystical currents within Islam appear to be driven by polemical and apologetic agendas. It is true that they have improved our knowledge of the nascent ascetic-mystical movement in Islam. However, by insisting on the “autochthonous” Islamic and Qur’anic origins of Sufism, we risk ignoring the obvious for the sake of a wrongly construed notion of political correctness or ideological decorum.

To return to Hodgson’s thesis about the role of the human temperament in the formation of religious traditions. If we grant that the availability of temperamental accommodations within a religious tradition does matter and that, to be competitive, early Islam (or, to be exact, its followers) sought to consciously expand its recruitment base by adopting the ascetic-mystical beliefs and practices of the Mediterranean region, then the question arises why the Muslim version of this ascetic-mystical piety has turned out to be so successful and distinctive in the long run? Hodgson’s “temperamental thesis” is insufficient to answer this question. Empirical observations indicate that “natural-born” ascetics and mystics are but a tiny minority not only in any human collectivity of our own age but also in the premodern one. Sufism’s popular appeal and effective recruitment strategies were based on broader foundations than Hodgson’s thesis implies. At work were deeper and complex social mechanisms that scholars of Islam are still at pains to unravel.

Alexander Knysh is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Michigan’s Department of Middle East Studies. He obtained his doctoral degree from the Institute for Oriental Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1986. His research interests include Islamic mysticism (Sufism) and Islamic theological, philosophical, and juridical thought in historical perspective. His recent work has addressed the vicissitudes of Islamic/Islamist movements in local contexts (especially in Yemen, North Africa, Russia and the Northern Caucasus). He has numerous academic publications on these subjects, including seven books. He conducted field research in Yemen in 1986-1989 and 1999 with special reference to the cult of saints as the site of contestation between adherents of traditional Yemeni religiosity and their “fundamentalist” opponents. Within PRISM, Prof. Knysh works on a project titled “In the Presence of Sanctity: The Sacred Geography of Yemen.”

Select Bibliography

Finn, Richard. Asceticism in the Graeco-Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Hagman, Patrik. The Asceticism of Isaac of Nineveh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Hodgson, Marshall. The Venture of Islam, 3 vols., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

Khalil, Atif and Shiraz Sheikh, Sufism in Western Historiography. In Philosophy East and West, Volume 66, Number 1, January 2016, 194–217.

Karamustafa, Ahmet. Sufism: The Formative Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

Knysh, Alexander. Islamic Mysticism: A Short History. 2nd ed. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010).

Knysh, Alexander. Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).

Massignon, Louis. Essay on the Origins of the Technical Language of Islamic Mysticism. Translated from the French with an introduction by Benjamin Clark (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997).

McGinn, Bernard. The Foundations of Mysticism. Vol. 1. The Presence of God (New York: Crossroad, 1991).

McNeill, John and William McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s-Eye View of World History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

Nicholson, Reynold. The Mystics of Islam (London: Arkana, 1989).

Scholem, Gershom. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995).

Smith, Margaret. Muslim Women Mystics: The Life and Work of Rabi‘a and Other Women Mystics in Islam. 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oneworld, 2001).

Smith, Margaret. Studies in Early Mysticism in the Near and Middle East (London: The Sheldon Press and New York and Toronto: The Macmillan, 1931).

Vööbus, Arthur. History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient. Vol. 1 (Louvain: CorpusSCO, 1958).

Watt, Montgomery W. The Majesty that was Islam: The Islamic World, 661-1100 (New York: Praeger, 1974).

Wimbush, Vincent and Richard Valantasis (eds.), Asceticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

That said, it has been a common joke among scholars of mysticism to point out that immediately after a mystic suggests that God, or the transcendent reality, is somehow beyond expression, they go about writing hundreds and hundreds of pages about this very thing. Many mystics do not seem to have pangs of conscience about speaking quite a bit about the extraordinary thing they just encountered. For example, the prophet Ezekiel (1:1-26) sounds like a kid who visits Hamley’s toy store in London for the first time.

More analytical experiencers, such as Teresa of Avila and St. Edith Stein, may adopt a more cautious approach, attempting to understand their experiences by categorizing them and remaining suspicious. Already, the Christian Desert Fathers showed remarkable reluctance towards visions and experiences because they felt that all this belonged to the realm of Satan, the deceiver. Medieval mystics and their interlocutors developed the literary genre of guides to spiritual discernment that sought to help individuals interpret their experiences.

All this requires the use of language.

Our project, “The Surface and the Deep” (SaD, University of Helsinki), investigates conundrums concerning the use of religious language. In this short blog post, I highlight some cases in which philosophical analysis can clarify how mystical language functions.

Consider Augustine’s words in his De Doctrina Christiana (1.6), on the question “In what sense God is ineffable”

Have I spoken of God, or uttered His praise, in any worthy way? Nay, I feel that I have done nothing more than desire to speak; and if I have said anything, it is not what I desired to say. How do I know this, except from the fact that God is unspeakable? But what I have said, if it had been unspeakable, could not have been spoken. And so God is not even to be called “unspeakable,” because to say even this is to speak of Him. Thus there arises a curious contradiction of words, because if the unspeakable is what cannot be spoken of, it is not unspeakable if it can be called unspeakable. And this opposition of words is rather to be avoided by silence than to be explained away by speech. And yet God, although nothing worthy of His greatness can be said of Him, has condescended to accept the worship of men’s mouths, and has desired us through the medium of our own words to rejoice in His praise. For on this principle it is that He is called Deus (God). For the sound of those two syllables in itself conveys no true knowledge of His nature; but yet all who know the Latin tongue are led, when that sound reaches their ears, to think of a nature supreme in excellence and eternal in existence.

Augustine clearly recognizes the problem we face when we attempt to speak of something that cannot be spoken of. Like Wittgenstein, he acknowledges that silence is an option, but he chooses not to pursue it. Instead, he relies on God’s way of revealing himself asymmetrically and making the transcendent reality available to human language.

Of course, the question that remains is how you know that God has, in fact, revealed himself as the Divine Father, within this particular theological tradition. This question of verification must be set aside for now; instead, I focus on two minor issues that may help readers understand how religious language functions.

Even in the case of supposed revelation, how is language supposed to work concerning the things that supposedly surpass the limits of language?

First, authors typically distinguish between knowing a fact about a thing and knowing the nature of a thing. For example, I might know that Alexander Stubb is the president of Finland, yet I may not know him personally. I may know multiple facts about him yet be entirely in the dark about how he is as a person. Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologica Ia, Q3, pr.) holds that we cannot know God in his essence, yet God can be known through his effects. Therefore, religious language is always to some extent analogous, and it never presupposes perfect grasp of the object.

Suppose God is not like an ordinary object that can be easily referred to; how is the reference then supposed to work? Some time ago, while I was building our cabin and my son was helping me, I asked him to hand me a spirit level (in Finnish, it’s a rather funny word, “vatupassi”). At that time, he did not know what vatupassi is. I pointed it out to him, but even after that, he did not understand what it does or how it works. It was only after the practical demonstration that he came to understand the meaning of the word. Religious language is also to some extent practical, even if it contains many abstract propositions and claims. Spiritual way of speaking contains expressions of hope and despair, various ways of addressing, calling for help, and so on. These are often combined with multiple conducts and practices that can be studied to understand the meaning of specific words.

Second, the same authors also often use words like ‘ineffable’ or ‘unknowable’. These are negative terms, yet they portray in their negativity a degree of knowledge. When you say that you do not know, you know at least one thing, that is, that you do not know. Somewhat similar cases would include statements such as: “I do not know what cards you are holding in your hand” or “I do not know what Stubb decides to do next.” These statements convey several points about the nature of, for example, poker or the current Finnish president. Similarly, statements that emphasize God’s ineffability preclude several facts about God. These include statements like, “God is not like an ordinary object”, “God is supreme to all other things that exist”, “If God exists, God knows the future”, and so on.

Therefore, it seems that there are multiple ways of speaking about God and of making sense. Everybody knows what these sentences mean, and no one who understands these basic facts thinks that they somehow take God captive or show irreverence towards God, or the ultimate Reality, or whatever is your favorite term.

All that said, where Wittgenstein is right is the need for humility. The above establishes that this attitude can arise within theological traditions. Our language can grasp phenomena only in a fragmented fashion, and as humans, we cannot know their essences or natures. Even with these caveats, there is a lot we can speak about, although we must acknowledge that many things we say are always less than perfect. In fact, when we understand the analogous nature of language, it has no boundaries.

So, let us speak.

Olli-Pekka Vainio is Professor of Dogmatics at the Faculty of Theology of the University of Helsinki. His areas of expertise include recent Systematic and Analytic Theology, Theological Epistemology, Reformation theology and Political Theology. He defended his Doctor of Theology in 2004 on the development of the Lutheran doctrine of justification and has worked, among others, on the thought of Martin Luther and Søren Kierkegaard. Vainio is a member of the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton (USA), where he was a visiting scholar in 2008 and 2016–17. During this period, he worked on a NASA-funded project investigating the societal implications of astrobiology. In 2011–2012, he worked as a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oxford. Vainio was a member of the Centre of Excellence in Philosophical Psychology, Morality and Politics of the Academy of Finland in 2008–2013. He is a member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters and a Senior Global Fellow (2024) of the University of St. Andrews and a member of the St. Andrews SETI Post-Detection Hub.

I had felt in his book a flavor of mysticism but was astonished when I found he had become a complete mystic. He reads people like Kierkegaard and Angelus Silesius, and he seriously contemplates becoming a monk.1

Russell had known Wittgenstein as a logician. But at the end of Wittgenstein’s first book, titled Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP), a thread of cryptic, almost religious statements emerges: the mystical makes itself manifest (TLP 6.522), the world is a miracle (TLP 6.44), and God – no longer merely a logical device but now taking on a distinctly religious contour – ends up not revealing himself in the world (TLP 6.432). What had led Wittgenstein to strike such unmistakably mystical tones? Was it simply that his logical system seemed to point towards an inexplicable “essential harmony” between world, language and reality? Or might this mysticism be even more closely bound up with his personal experiences in WWI?

Ludwig Wittgenstein was the ninth (and youngest) child of one of the richest families in Europe. His father was an industrial tycoon of the Austrian steel industry, and Wittgenstein grew up in comfort – though under a regime of considerable sternness. Indeed, the history of the Wittgenstein family has been amply documented; several of its members ultimately met tragic fates.2

After considerable internal family tensions, Wittgenstein’s father eventually acquiesced to his son’s wish to study engineering, a decision that led Wittgenstein to Manchester to pursue advanced technical studies. While there, he became increasingly captivated – almost consumed – by questions in logic and the foundations of mathematics, and a new phase of academic exploration began. This intellectual trajectory eventually brought him to the doorstep of Gottlob Frege (1848 – 1925). Frege, however, believing himself too old to guide Wittgenstein’s intellectual ambitions, advised him instead to seek out Bertrand Russell, then a renowned intellectual at the height of his powers. Although Wittgenstein struck Russell as eccentric, even oddly intense at first, it did not take long before Russell became profoundly fond of him – going so far as to call the young Austrian a “genius.”3 So, what exactly concerned Frege and Russell, and what innovation did Wittgenstein introduce?

Frege had inaugurated a revolution with far-reaching implications for mathematics, logic, language, and even metaphysics. His chief contribution was the creation of a symbolic system that allowed logicians to capture not only the kinds of inference analyzed by Aristotle, but also those that fall outside the scope of Aristotelian methods.4 Years later, Russell, together with A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947), produced a monumental work whose axiomatic foundations differed in significant ways from those Frege had proposed. In short, each of them developed a “logical system” grounded in a distinct set of axioms, through which they advanced important claims about the very essence of logical truth. This immediately raises a striking question: if logic is meant to be the most general domain of abstract inquiry, how could two distinct formal frameworks emerge within the same science? If logic is to retain its status as the most general discipline, then there must be some way of distinguishing genuinely logical truths from the kinds of statements made within particular scientific fields. However, here we encounter a troubling difficulty: how can one articulate – or even make visible – this sui generis form of necessity? How, in other words, can we assess the relation between logical truths and the axioms on which they supposedly rest? Such reflection risks forcing the theorist to concede that a significant portion of logical truths would simply follow from the axioms themselves. And if that is the case, from where would the truth – or even the necessity – of those axioms then derive?

Many aphorisms in the TLP address precisely this tension. Wittgenstein approaches the issue by reframing it through the conditions under which language can meaningfully represent the world, or how the world must be in order to be represented by language. Ultimately, he is somehow able to “tackle” the general character of logical necessity.5 But a few lines later, things become strange. Wittgenstein’s aphorisms begin with a set of questions rooted in the philosophy of logic only to culminate, quite unexpectedly, in the problem of mysticism. All of a sudden, the world becomes independent of one’s will (TLP 6.373) and the reader faces somewhat religious statements – for example, that the sense of the world must lie outside of it (TLP 6.41).

It is surprising that such a theme should find a place in a philosophical project concerned with the relation between logic and language – a project that openly criticizes the proposals of Frege and Russell. Could this be connected to the fact that he composed this part of the work while in the trenches, following occurrences that could, legitimately, be described as traumatic? Had he discovered God beyond the bayonets, or even perhaps in Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, a book that he reportedly kept with him at all times?

Unsurprisingly, this eccentric change of tone has long troubled scholars, and the range of interpretations is considerable. Yet, all these approaches begin strictly from a philosophical horizon shaped by logical and linguistic concerns.6 That is, the mystical impulse that erupts at the end of the Tractatus is presented as the outcome of a logical investigation that, on the one hand, may be taken to suggest the existence of domains inaccessible to linguistic analysis, and, on the other, may signal precisely the illusion that the theory seeks to dispel when determined logical considerations are misapplied and misunderstood. One way or another, objections persist, for no interpretive framework fully meets Wittgenstein’s own methodological demands.

In my view, the Tractatus – along with Wittgenstein’s early and later writings – ought to be understood within a broader field of convergence. It is not, as some have suggested, the mere intersection of two philosophical segments but rather of three traditions: logic (i), critical philosophy (ii), and mysticism (iii). Wittgenstein’s work expresses a distinctive form of mysticism, one that is only partially determined by the logic of our language. From this standpoint, I believe that the Tractatus represents the most successful contemporary achievement within the mystical tradition – the last major “breakthrough,” so to speak, in philosophical mysticism – precisely because it weaves into its conception of the mystical a rigorous application of logic, which, together with the rest of the Tractatus, amounts to an unprecedented innovation in logic itself.

Thus, although the Tractatus is undeniably a mystical work, it may also be regarded as an original contribution to the philosophy of logic, for Wittgenstein introduces a series of technical innovations and discussions. But a pure logical reading would, in my view, restrict our understanding of his work as a whole, insofar as it would overlook the tacit influence of a particular kind of mysticism that extends beyond the domain of logical analysis. Such a reading would allow us to grasp the strictly logical innovations of the text, but at the cost of neglecting other problems that remain embedded within the author’s broader project.

My suggestion is that these two domains – the domain that can be described through logic and the domain beyond logical descriptions – can be reconciled through philosophical mysticism.7 Indeed, I hold that this same mystical inclination resurfaces throughout his middle period – most notably in the Lecture on Ethics, and continuing all the way into his Philosophical Investigations in a rather distinctive manner. It is, interestingly enough, the most stable thread running through the different periods of his work. His conception of logic may change but his mystical or religious outlook seems to remain remarkably steady over time. Throughout his work, he kept pursuing a deeper, almost divine, purpose. Notably, years after the TLP, he writes: “I would like to say ‘This book is written to the glory of God,’ but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood.” Taking Wittgenstein’s mysticism more seriously, and not merely as a byproduct of his logic, could give us new insights into his understanding of life and reality, offering not only a distinct grasp of logic but also a reinvigorated comprehension of mysticism.

Rodrigo C. C. Lima is currently pursuing a joint PhD between Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France) and the University of São Paulo (Brazil), specializing in philosophy of religion. His research focuses on the implications of mysticism for religious discourse and its intersections with epistemology and logic. He also maintains a strong interest in contemporary analytic philosophy, particularly the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Rodrigo has been a visiting student at institutions such as Sciences Po Paris and Peking University.

In the new year, we are looking forward to a post by Rodrigo Lima (Universities of São Paulo and Paris 1) on a mystical reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein on January 15th - and further posts on comparative mysticism, Brahminic traditions, and Islamic philosophy of religion.

Thank you all for your support - and stay tuned!

To understand how Plotinus envisions experience of the divine principles, we have to note that for him our condition is fallen. We are alienated from our true self or true nature (which is incorporeal and belongs to the intelligible realm) and, as a result, we are alienated from the experience of the Good, which Plotinus calls our God and Father (Enn. V.1.1; I.6.8). This alienation emerges from our excessive attention and emotional attachment to the sensible realm or, more precisely, to what is partial: our body, its sensations, perceptions, and affective experiences.

Plotinus believes that it is possible for everyone, regardless of sex, race, education or social status (I.6.8), to return to his true self and to the Good, which is the superior principle and source of all reality. He divides this mystical journey into two great stages: first, we have to return to the intelligible realm; second, we have to transcend that realm to attain the Good (I.3.13-18). The first stage can be further divided into stages corresponding to the cosmic principles of Plotinus’s philosophy: we have to return from our fallen state, first, to Nature, then, from Nature to Soul, and, finally, from Soul to Intellect (III.8.8.1).

In order to achieve the contemplation of Nature—the principle which produces the sensible universe in which we lead our bodily existence—we have to purify our soul from passions and attachments. To attain this contemplation, it is necessary to practice virtues. Plotinus mentions four classical civic virtues that prepare the soul for purification: prudence, courage, temperance, and justice. Purification itself is achieved through four kathartic or purificatory virtues. These purificatory virtues have the same names but consist not in our judgments, emotional states, and external actions resulting from them, but in our awareness that our soul is metaphysically different and free from our body and its experiences. The paradox is that we need to purify our soul to realize that we did not actually have to purify it—it is, in fact, inherently pure and cannot be influenced by anything sensible or bodily.

The purified individual soul is a part of Soul-hypostasis. When we recover self-knowledge, we thus find ourselves capable of participating in Nature and in the World Soul, which are cosmic, divine beings, active in bringing about the sensible world. For an individual, the mystical stage of Soul is characterized by the awareness that the whole universe exists in our consciousness rather than outside of us, and that we transcend time. It is essential that Plotinus sees this contemplation not as something that we have to achieve, but rather as something that is already taking place in us—we have merely become oblivious to it because of our excessive focus on sensible experiences. Ultimately, Plotinus wants us to realize a dimension of our consciousness that is already present and not obtain something external to our being.

After that stage we can ascend further to the contemplation of Intellect, which is the summit of the intelligible realm. If the mystical experience of Nature and Soul consists in the awareness of what we are not, as individual souls (we are not the body, we are not inside the universe, we are not in time), the experience of self-knowledge at the level of Intellect consists in the awareness of what we are as individual intellects. Just as our individual soul participates in the cosmic Soul, our individual intellect participates in Intellect, which we now come to realize. As in the case of the soul’s realization, the intellect’s realization also concerns something that we already possess but have to become aware of.

If the contemplation of Soul reveals that the universe of space and time exists inside of us (which Plotinus describes as the experience of “kinship” between ourselves and whatever we experience), the contemplation of Intellect is more than this kinship: it is the sense of sameness with the content of our experience, based on the Aristotelian doctrine of the identity between being and thinking (III.8.8.1-8). This sameness or identity doesn’t obliterate our personal, individual existence, because in Intellect sameness or identity is counterbalanced by otherness or difference. It means that the mystical experience at the level of Intellect is a vivid sense that “I” am everything I experience—but also that I am still distinct from that. One of the key aspects of Plotinus’ philosophy and mysticism is that no degree of mystical union makes the personal, individual self dissolve (IV.3.5.1-6). Our experience of separation is dissolved, but ontologically speaking, we do not cease to exist.

The last stage of the mystical journey in Plotinus is the final movement towards the Good or the One above Intellect. To some degree, this stage also covers a form of awareness whose object already exists in reality. Since the Good is omnipresent as the source of all existence, life, and knowledge, it would be wrong to claim that we are not yet in the Good. We are—but we are not aware of it, which Plotinus describes through a metaphor of “turning away” from the Good (VI.9.8).

Plotinus occasionally describes the first phase of that final union with the Good as our return to what is always present, to what is most real in us and in everything else. However, he also insists that we cannot achieve the highest union by ourselves and that it lies completely beyond our capacities. We are, ontologically speaking, parts of Soul and Intellect, but we are not parts of the One, because it has no parts, and we are not the One. Plotinus states that we have to wait until the Good reveals itself to us, like the sun rising over the ocean (V.8.5.3-7). He also affirms that the Good gives us love that draws us to it but that, ultimately, we have to be “lifted up by the Giver of love”, that is, by the Good itself (VI.7.22.19-20).

The supreme union with the Good is no longer knowledge or awareness of anything intelligible or nameable. It is the “presence more powerful than knowledge” (VI.9.4.3-4). However, even though this simple unity exceeds knowledge or awareness, and even if our intellect is blinded by the light of the Good, Plotinus does not see any cause for unease in this excess or blinding. The One, he says, gives all beings “something better and greater than that they should know him—he is the Good of the others—he gives them rather lay hold of him, in itself, as far as they are able” (V.6.6.33-36).

This intimate union with the Good blurs our awareness of our body, senses and mental activity. But Plotinus suggests that the essence of the contemplation of the Good should not simply be sought in these temporary suspensions of our faculties. Scholars are enchanted by Porphyry’s claim that Plotinus experienced the final union with the One six times during the four years that Porphyry spent with him (Vita Plotini 23), but there are no other grounds for that claim apart from Porphyry’s words.

The Enneads suggest a somewhat different picture. Certain kinds of union may be temporary or less frequent, but Plotinus claims, in a much ignored passage, that we see the Good “often” or “much” (polu in Greek: VI.9.7.26-27). As Plotinus describes in his treatise On Happiness (I.4), we exist and live in the Good and the goal of life is to turn towards it, even though our fallen condition inclines us to turn away from what is best and grasp what is worse. Plotinus’s mysticism consists not merely in these temporary contemplative experiences but our stable possession of the Good that gives us happiness (eudaimonia) and is the goal of life.

Further reading:

Plotinus, Enneads, text with an English translation by A. H. Armstrong, vols. 1–7,

Cambridge, Mass., and London 1966–1988.

M. Stróżyński, Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World: Faces of Being and Mirrors of Intellect, Cambridge 2024.

Mateusz Stróżyński is a Classicist, philosopher, psychologist, and psychotherapist, working as Full Professor in the Institute of Classical Philology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. He is interested in ancient philosophy, especially the Platonic tradition. He is a founding editor of Antigone, a journal popularizing Classics and its reception and a co-founder of Tyrannica, an interdisciplinary network dedicated to the study of authoritarianism from antiquity to modern times. His most recent books are Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World: Faces of Being and Mirrors of Intellect (Cambridge UP, 2024) and Plato and Jesus, not Caesar: Metaphysics of Freedom and Tyranny in Younger Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2026).

Prof. Stróżyński is one of the most renowned contemporary Plotinus scholars. His recent monograph Plotinus on the Contemplation of the Intelligible World: Faces of Being and Mirrors of Intellect is one of the most important recent contributions to the study of Neoplatonism and mysticism.

Stay tuned for the next edition of Mystic Openings!

Rahner published the quotation in two versions: as a prediction about the “future religious person,” as cited here, or about the “future Christian.” Yet whether it is about Christians or others: the vast majority of religious people today don’t seem to be mystics but still continue to exist. Or is this impression misleading? In Western societies, the number of people identifying with one of the mainline churches is clearly and persistently shrinking. Admittedly, people giving up their commitment to traditional churches does not necessarily mean that they become less religious. But is there any evidence that “mystics” are on the rise?

Rahner designated as “mystics” not only those who have some kind of religious experience but those people who have some experience of “the absolute mystery that we call ‘God’,” which “communicates itself silently as the true mystery of our own existence.” Sociological surveys support the view that religious persistence is indeed connected to religious experience. Yet still, religious experience, especially in its more enthusiast forms, is often connected to highly dogmatic and even fundamentalist beliefs, that is, in Rahner’s sense, to rather non-mystical spiritualities. Why, then, was Rahner foreseeing a promising future for an experience that comes along with the transcendence of any definite and clear-cut images of the divine?

He argues that religious experience is increasingly necessary because of the rise of religious diversity and the increase of decidedly non-religious worldviews (the “two pluralisms”, as Peter Berger called them). Under those conditions, said Rahner, individual faith is no longer supported by a uniform and unquestioned public milieu. But this argument seems to presuppose that one can only choose between skepticism, agnosticism, or relativism, or else, carry on with one of the traditional forms of faith, now spurred and carried by personal experience instead of collective uniformity. This is one way of how one could read Rahner. And it seems to be the way that explains best the vitality of charismatic types of religiosities around the world. This reading implies that religiously diverse societies could only jeopardize individual faith.

But it is perhaps not the only way to interpret Rahner’s quotation. What if religiously plural societies have a potential to support and sustain individual faith in their own peculiar ways? It is with this question that the present and future significance of mystical spirituality comes into view.

The Indian sociologist and theologian Syed Hasan Askari (1932–2008), one of the pioneers in the 20^th century inter-faith movement, had experienced in his youth the horrific slaughter that accompanied the Indian partition and claimed at least half a million lives. One of the arguments that led to this human and religious catastrophe was the view that religiously homogenous societies would be more suitable to support the faith of individuals – a view that Askari contested throughout his life with theological arguments. According to him a religiously diverse society is preferable to a mono-religious one because religious diversity itself is “a theological necessity, almost a blessing”. It is “a school of true humility” because of its potential to show the limitations of each tradition and simultaneously the riches lying in their variety. As such, they give “praise to the Mystery and Transcendence of the Reality […] reflected in each one of them and yet [..] independent of them all.” From Askari’s perspective, a mystical spirituality is better equipped to accommodate religiously plural societies, and even more importantly, to respond to the fact that our planet has always been a religiously diverse place, now progressively becoming the global society. In that sense, religiously plural societies do not just jeopardize the faith of their members - there is a way in which they support it. The kind of faith to which they are indeed a threat is the faith that absolutizes a particular religious tradition in not permitting other religions beside it, thereby making it “almost a god unto itself” (Askari) and thus turning it into an idol. In contrast, the kind of faith that they can sustain and support is the faith that welcomes religious diversity as a resource for discovering the wealth of marks that the divine has left within and throughout the diverse humanity, in “communicating itself,” to quote Rahner again, “as the true mystery of our own existence.”

In its emphasis on the Ultimate as necessarily transcending all human words and concepts, mystical spirituality does not understand diverging concepts, images, or names as relating directly to the Ultimate in itself. For, it would be self-contradictory to conceptualize the inconceivable. “The Dao that can be spoken of is not the true Dao” (Daodejing 1). Wittgenstein’s famous affirmation: “There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical,” suggests an alternative understanding of divine names and predicates. In mystical spirituality, statements about the Ultimate can be understood as statements about the different ways by which the inexpressible mystery shows itself in human experience. If different, diverging and seemingly conflicting predicates about the Ultimate are deciphered as relating to different ways of experiencing it, they are no longer necessarily incompatible. They may not only be compatible but even complementary in that they protect each other against the danger of spiritual one-sidedness. This is the hermeneutical key that makes mystical spirituality better suited to religiously plurals societies. With this key, religious people can have faith together alongside others and not in opposition to them.

In view of Rahner’s spirituality of tomorrow – now increasingly becoming the spirituality of our today – it will be beneficial to point out that the religious traditions of the past – the spirituality of yesterday – have preserved a key: the ability to understand and experience our plural societies as spiritually supportive rather than undermining. When we compare the classics of mystical spirituality around the globe, we will discover that despite and within all their diversity of imagery, conceptuality, and even mentality there is much of reciprocal illumination and conformation regarding the said parameters of religious hermeneutics. In this way, the multi-traditional and inter-traditional rediscovery of mystical treasures – their reading and contemplating in comparative light – will itself exemplify and confirm the interpretation of religious diversity that they suggest. Some mystics of the past have demonstrated such spiritual openness and hospitality towards other religious traditions. But certainly not all of them. So, our present world has not only something to learn from mystical traditions but also something to teach to their contemporary followers and practitioners.

And finally, what about the rise of naturalist worldviews, which also form an essential component of contemporary diversity? Can mystical spirituality be helpful in this respect as well? Not naturally. If my understanding is correct, in yesterday’s spirituality we don’t find too many mystics who granted serious and radical doubt a meaningful place within their faith. Perhaps this is another field where contemporary mystics can and should learn from our now much more heightened awareness of diversity: Learning in a new and significant way that faith can flourish not through beliefs that believe to know, but through beliefs that know they believe. We might be wrong. But why should such a confession of cognitive uncertainty be incompatible with a felt confidence in divine mystery?

References

Karl Rahner, “Frömmigkeit heute und morgen”, in: Geist und Leben 39:5 (1996) 326-342.

Hasan Askari, Towards a Trans-Religious Dimension, in: Spiritual Quest, Pudsey: Seven Mirrors, 120-133.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1921). Translated by F. P. Ramsey and edited by C. K. Ogden. https://wittgensteinproject.org/w/index.php/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus_(English)

Perry Schmidt-Leukel is Senior Professor of Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology at the University of Muenster, Germany. He taught at the universities of Munich, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Glasgow, and Muenster. His research focusses on Buddhist studies, inter-faith relations, Buddhist-Christian dialogue and interreligious theology. He published more than 30 books in different languages, including Understanding Buddhism (2006); Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Theology (2017); Buddha Mind – Christ Mind. A Christian Commentary on the Bodhicaryāvatāra (2019); God Beyond Boundaries (2019); The Celestial Web. Buddhism and Christianity – A Different Comparison (2024), and, most recently, Das Wort vom Geheimnis der Welt (2025). In 2015 he presented the renowned Gifford Lectures. He received several awards and distinctions including the Höffmann Academic Award for Intercultural Competence (2019) and the Frederick J. Streng Award for Excellence in Buddhist-Christian Studies (2020). A festschrift in his honor (Beyond Boundaries) was edited in 2024 by Melanie Barbato, Mathias Schneider, and Fabian Völker. In PRISM he leads the project “Classics of Mystical Spirituality”.