[Vision2020] Is the Royal Couple Really on a "Mystical" Journey?

[nickgier at roadrunner.com]

Good Morning Visionaries:

This is my radio commentary/column for this week.  I always like to take an occasional break from the politics and economics.  The full version with a link to the scholarly article is attached.

The most egregious misuse of the word "mysticism" is describing contemporary physics as mystical. Yes, there are some very mysterious—even perverse as one writer quipped—things going on in this exciting discipline.  Physicists and scientists in general are investigating the basic elements of reality, but they have no experiences of union with them nor does reality appear to them as the undifferentiated divine One that mystics report. If anything, reality is becoming more differentiated with the discovery of new subatomic particles.

May you all (perhaps this summer)have a brief union with ultimate reality,

Nick

IS THE ROYAL COUPLE REALLY ON A “MYSTICAL” JOURNEY?

My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except God Himself.

~St. Catherine of Genoa

Misuse of our language is rampant, and I am writing today to “refudiate” (thank you Sarah) all malapropisms and linguistic misapplications. I hope I don’t “misremember” (thank you George) all the instances that I have encountered.

As a religious scholar my pet peeve is the misuse of the word “mystical.” The last straw was Tina Brown’s swoon that Prince William and Catherine Middleton are on a “mystical” journey.  I just have one question: Does the good lady qualify as a mystical bride of Christ after having shared a bed with her prince before marriage?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the "mystical" as "spiritual union with God transcending human comprehension."  This I believe is a good basic definition, but it needs to be revised to include those who claim union with an impersonal reality such as the Hindu Brahman. All mystics report that the individual self is completely dissolved and identified with ultimate reality.  

St. Catherine of Genoa, a medieval mystic, speaks of the dissolution of the self into God in the following way: "My Me is God, nor do I recognize any other Me except God Himself." This is Catherine’s take on the Apostle Paul=s famous phrase “Not I, but Christ.”  This is essentially the same as the Hindu saying “Not I, but Brahman,” or the Buddhist saying “Not I, but the Buddha nature.” 
 

The most common misapplication of the word mysticism is confusing it with the mysterious.  One of my favorite examples is NPR interviewee who claimed that llamas have “mystical” stress relieving qualities. When people say that a book, a religion, or a philosophy is “mystical,” they usually mean that it is deep, profound, speculative, metaphysical, esoteric, or just plain philosophical.  

In our English literature classes we learn that William Blake was a great “mystical” poet, but his major poems describe visions not union with God.  A vision is full of vivid images and has a narrative line, one that can be explained in words.  By contrast the mystical experience has little or no content and the mystic confesses that the experience cannot be expressed in language. 

Nature mysticism is the most widespread form of mystical experience.  Many people have had powerful experiences of unity with nature that they have declared to be ineffable.  Zen Buddhism and Chinese Daoism contain very good examples of nature mysticism.  

Some might say that the mystical experience is “all in the head,” and might propose that it is nothing but an altered state of consciousness.  If this is so, then the experience could be created either by some form of brain stimulation or the ingestion of a drug.  Most drug experiences, however, appear visionary rather than mystical, because they usually contain vivid content and most subjects appear to be able to give some account of them.  

The most controversial Christian mystic was Meister Eckhart (1260–1327), who sometimes called God “merely nothing”—bloss nit in his medieval German. For Eckhart this was not just emptiness, but a nothingness which is all things–a no-thing-ness–no particular thing.  As Eckhart states: “The knower and the known are one.  God and I, we are one in knowledge,” and in reality, I will add. 

The reader will note that Eckhart is not a saint but is honored solely by his master’s degree. The church declared him a heretic for denying the personality of God. In most Asian traditions mystics were admired and their union with the divine was taken as the highest spiritual goal.  In stark contrast mystics have stood at the periphery of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and have been viewed with suspicion. Jealous priests rejected their claims that they could have direct access to God outside the church and its sacraments.

Catholics and mainline Protestants have learned to appreciate Christian mystics, and I urge evangelicals to use the word correctly and rediscover the deep meaning of this universal religious experience.  

Nick Gier taught philosophy and religion at the University of Idaho for 31 years.  

 



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