Mysticism’s Threat to Doctrine

I am a historian of philosophy and theology, which is to say that the authors I work on are almost exclusively those who make doctrine. Moreover, a great deal of my work has been focused on Thomas Aquinas, the doctrine maker extraordinaire of the later Middle Ages. From that vantage point, it is interesting to consider the question of whether mysticism, by its nature, must necessarily conflict with doctrine.For present purposes, I will limit myself to the Christian tradition of the later Middle Ages, and I will understand mysticism generally as involving experiences that are inherently phenomenological (concerning individual felt experience) and transcendent (going beyond our mundane reality to involve an encounter with God). I will understand doctrine, in contrast, as the body of written teachings endorsed by the church.Perhaps a good place to begin in considering the difficulty of harmonizing mysticism and doctrine is to focus on the phenomenological (or experiential) character of mysticism, and the way in which an experience might seem simply to descend on someone, unbidden and unshaped. Perhaps it will cohere with doctrine or perhaps it will not, but it is what it is. This is, however, surely a naive conception of such an experience. Reflection on the history of mysticism shows it to be filtered through preconceptions of all sorts, including, no doubt, doctrinal preconceptions. As with all experience, transcendent and mundane, how we interpret it depends enormously on the preconceptions we carry with us. Hence there is no reason in principle that mystical experience could not reconcile itself to doctrine.Yet an experience, to be reconciled with doctrine, must be cast in the form of a proposition. And here the mystic faces an immediate obstacle, which is that experience in general—and transcendent experience in particular—is notoriously difficult to capture in language. As the fourteenth-century Franciscan tertiary Angela of Foligno complains: “When I return to myself after perceiving these divine secrets . . . [and] speak entirely from outside the experience, I say words that come nowhere near describing the divine workings that are produced in my soul. My statements about them ruin the reality they represent.”1One response to such obstacles is simply to refuse to put the experience into words. This is one way to interpret Thomas Aquinas’s famous remark at the end of his life when he stopped writing: “All I have written seems like straw.” Ever the careful champion of doctrine, Aquinas did not try to express his new, end-of-life experiences. If he had, this would have been liable to cause trouble, since it is not likely that a transcendent experience could be sufficiently captured by the cold, analytic language of doctrine. So the apophatic mystical tradition is likely to avoid trouble with doctrine only if it remains silent.Yet in a way such silence is itself a way of making trouble, for the insistence on the ineffability of experience looks itself like a rebuke to the mainstream theological tradition, which makes its living by putting its claims down in words. If the claims of doctrine do not do justice to the experience of the mystic, then what value do such claims have? Are they, indeed, just so much straw? Mysticism here challenges doctrine even when it remains blissfully silent.It is standard to distinguish this apophatic tradition from an affective tradition in mysticism. In the affective tradition, a direct connection with God is expressible, but not through rational doctrine. One understands God not through the mind but through the body—through altered physical states such as mystic death, through emotional states such as uncontrollable weeping or laughter, and through parasensory states such as visions. Consider again Angela of Foligno: When I am in that darkness I do not remember anything about anything human, or the God-man, or anything which has a form. Nevertheless, I see all and I see nothing. As what I have spoken of withdraws and stays with me, I see the God-man. He draws my soul with great gentleness, and he sometimes says to me: “You are I, and I am you.” I see, then, those eyes and that face so gracious and attractive as he leans to embrace me.2Here experience takes on a sensual, perhaps sexual cast, and when it expresses itself in propositional form, its teachings—You are I and I am you—seem on their face to be plainly heretical.Among the theologians of the university, doctrinal dissent is easily controllable. If a claim is judged heretical, one finds the faulty premise, or invalid syllogism, and reconsiders the conclusion. Yet mystical experiences are not so readily disavowed. Of course one might conclude that the whole thing was the work of the devil, and such charges were commonly made. Yet when someone has the intimate experience of being touched by God, it is no simple matter to force a retraction. Consider Mechthild of Magdeburg: “I do not know how to write, nor can I, unless I see with the eyes of my soul and hear with the ears of my eternal spirit and feel in all the parts of my body the power of the Holy Spirit.”3 How are the abstract principles of doctrine supposed to compete with an experience such as this? How do you recant an experience that comes straight from the Holy Spirit?When such experiences become an independent window into the divine, the threat arises that doctrine may become superfluous. Thus Marguerite Porete argues that the soul can be joined to God in such a way that its will becomes God’s will, and that a person in this state need not pray or attend Mass or participate in any of the regular activities of the Christian life.4 If doctrine is to remain in force as doctrine, this sort of thing has to be brought under control. Thus communities of nuns who were frequently having mystic experiences during the Eucharist were sometimes forbidden the host until such experiences ceased. Occasionally, more extreme measures were required, as when Marguerite Porete herself was burned at the stake as a heretic in 1310. Yet the overwhelming majority of such cases led to no such drama. The women and men involved were devoutly committed to their church, and their immediate communities, and would have been quite appalled to find their spiritual exercises at odds with the religion they loved.Yet even if the reality was prosaic, the perceived threat of mysticism endured. When theologians and philosophers engaged in flights of speculation, they could be controlled easily enough by threatening to expel them from their positions of privilege within the university and the church. Mystical experience, in contrast, threatened to allow religious authority to escape its normally closed boundaries. Women can have mystical experiences. The poor can have mystical experiences. The uneducated can have mystical experiences. How could these people be controlled? How would church doctrine survive?Much here is indebted to forthcoming work by Christina Van Dyke

Doctrine · Epistemology · Mysticism · Theology · Medieval Literature and History · Medieval Philosophy and Theology · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

• Mysticism

  Open Access•Christina Van Dyke•The Cambridge History of Medieval…•2009

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