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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Many writers (including professional philosophers) often generalise about mysticism without a sufficiently close analysis of texts. Consequently the generalisations are often invalid. My present aim is to analyse one text and, in the light of this analysis, to offer some observations concerning mysticism in general and Christian mysticism in particular.
page 31 note 1 Little is known about Hilton. He was, almost certainly, an Augustinian canon. He probably died in 1395 and he wrote his book for the guidance of an anchoress. For Hilton's background and his relation to other English mystics see The English Mystical Tradition by David Knowles. I shall use Leo Sherley-Price's modern rendering which is based on Evelyn Underhill's edition.
page 32 note 1 Pp. 7–8.
page 33 note 1 Hilton makes it clear that in calling sin ‘nothing’ he means that it has no distinctive form of being (and a fortiori no form of being that is independent of God who obliterates it by his sovereign love). But Hilton does not mean that as a perversion of creaturely good sin lacks reality and power. On the contrary ‘the image of sin’ is ‘a false and misguided love of self’ which ‘will poison all the flowers in the garden of your soul’ (pp. 66–71).
page 33 note 2 PP. 114–16.
page 33 note 3 pp. 124–5.
page 34 note 1 Here Hilton anticipates St John of the Cross.
page 35 note 1 Pp. 250–1.
page 36 note 1 Religious Studies, October 1965.
page 36 note 2 In mysticism of the first type (usually known as ‘nature mysticism’) the barrier between the self and its world seems to vanish; all is felt as one and one as all. In mysticism of the second type the soul experiences itself as being substantially identical with (or at least participating in) the Absolute. In mysticism of the third type there is union of love between the soul and a substantially distinct God.
page 36 note 3 Similarly Smart claims that the Buddhist experience of Nirvana implies a doctrine—the doctrine of rebirth—that must be non-mystically guaranteed (p. 80).
page 36 note 4 By ‘auto-interpretation’ Smart means an interpretation given by the mystic himself. A ‘hetero’- interpretation is an interpretation ‘which may be placed upon it from a different point of view’ (p. 80).
page 37 note 1 Quoted (from Revelations vi. 17–18) by Knowles, (The English Mystical Tradition, London, 1964, p. 126).Google Scholar Knowles writes of Julian thus: ‘Throughout she is clear that when she speaks in the first person she is speaking nevertheless of all Christian men: Christ's love, Christ's death, are all for her, but they are also all for each soul that shall be saved’ (p. 129).
page 38 note 1 In fact recent study of all the major Christian mystics shows that their experience is indelibly stamped by Christian faith and practice. Thus David Knowles writes that ‘the great army of Christian mystics are unanimous in their assertion that it is through and in Christ that they attain to union with God and a knowledge of divine things’ (What is Mysticism? London, 1967, p. 75).Google Scholar More explicitly A. Léonard writes as follows in a penetrating and fully documented essay. ‘To describe Christian mystical experience we cannot dissociate the form and the matter, the psychological mode of mystical knowledge and the Christian realities which correspond to it. The two aspects, subjective and objective, of the phenomenon are complementary. There is no such thing as pure mysticism which would be like a structure without content, an intention without an object. God is the subject of mystical knowledge, perceived immediately and experimentally in the historic revelation of Christ, the sacramental life, and the organism of the Church’ (Mystery and Mysticism, Blackfriars Publications, London, 1956, p. 84).Google Scholar For a detailed confirmation of this judgment with reference to St John of the Cross (whom Smart includes in his list of mystics) see Trueman Dicken's The Crucible of Love (London, 1963).Google Scholar
page 39 note 1 Mystics themselves have been sensitive to the possibility of such distortion. Thus the author of the Cloud of Unknowing begins by saying that his book is meant only for ‘a perfect follower of Christ not only in active living, but in the sovereignest point of contemplative living’ He ends by insisting that the book must be read as a whole; ‘for if a man saw one part and not another, peradventure he should lightly be led into error’ (ed. by Evelyn, Underhill, London, 1956, pp. 39 and 265).Google Scholar
page 39 note 2 It is surprising how often writers on religious (and in particular mystical) experience pay no attention to cognate studies—especially to philosophical discussions of the general relation between experience (e.g. sense-experience) and interpretation, and to the increasing prominence that both Biblical and literary scholars give to ‘contextual’ analysis.
page 39 note 3 What is Mysticism? (p. 13).
page 40 note 1 London, 1963, p. 38.
page 40 note 2 I shall quote from the Methuen edition of 1960.
page 41 note 1 The shorter O.E.D.'s definition of mystic contains religious and non-religious meanings between which it is hard to detect even a minimal ‘family-resemblance’ It runs thus: ‘Spiritually allegorical; occult, esoteric; of hidden meaning, mysterious and awe-inspiring; one who seeks by contemplation and self-surrender to obtain union with or absorption into the Deity, or who believes in spiritual apprehension of truths beyond the understanding’
