Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with Japanese Thinkers by Louis Roy, O.P. (review)

486 BOOK REVIEWS such a difficult text and producing a good workable translation out of difficult, academic German. Nevertheless, too often the translation reads not like natural, if academic, English prose but precisely like a translation from academic German in which the sentences are overly long and the subordinate clauses tangle and pile up. Finally, while the editors are to be commended for retaining all citations from Eckhart in the original Latin or Middle High German, they leave these in the text and relegate the English translations to an appendix. This arrangement, to be sure, presents no difficulty to the Eckhart scholar; but in view of a more general readership, which this book merits, it would have made more sense to reverse this arrangement. But these criticisms are, as I have said, minor. This work is essential to any understanding of Eckhart and should be in the library of any institution where Eckhart's works are taught and studied. La Salle University Philadelphia, Pennsylvania ROBERTJ. DOBIE Mystical Consciousness: Western Perspectives and Dialogue with\]apanese Thinkers. By LOUIS ROY, O.P. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New'(ork Press, 2003. Pp. xxi +229. $62.50 (cloth), $21.95 (paper). ISBN 0-79145643 -9 (cloth), 0-7914-5644-7 (paper). In order to avoid expecting more from this book than the author intends, one must note carefully some key distinctions he makes in his preface and introduction. For one thing, although theJapanese Zen thinkers Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Nishitani Keiji, and Hisamatsu Shin'ichi are treated in the last three of the book's ten chapters, Roy deals almost exclusively with Western thinkers in the first seven chapters, in accordance with his stated aim offurthering aWestern philosophy of religion (xi). The dialogue with Japanese thinkers announced in the subtitle is therefore not extensive or pervasive. Moreover, Roy expressly limits his understanding of mystical consciousness to states marked by low levels of physiological and cognitive activity and therefore does not deal with any mystical phenomena that could be described as "consciousness-of"; he thus excludes not only somewhat uncommon phenomena like visions and auditions but also thoughts and feelings that could be a normal part of someone's relationship with God. This restriction, he claims, allows him to deal only with that sort of mystical consciousness that can quite easily be brought into dialogue with Zen (xx). BOOK REVIEWS 487 That last-named exclusion means that Roy will focus on only the last two of the following three kinds of consciousness to which he alludes at numerous places in his book. "Consciousness-of" he terms "consciousness C," the consciousness we have of things and people in our ordinary activities. It is, by definition, an awareness of objects. Likewise part of our ordinary consciousness is what Roy calls "consciousness B," a prereflective, unobjectified kind of knowing that permeates all of our ordinary states and activities. One simply knows that something is happening without knowing any specific object. "ConsciousnessA," by which Roy means mystical consciousness (in the restricted sense of mysticism indicated above), is likewise "consciousness-in," but unlike consciousness B it obtains in objectless states, states beyond any distinction between subject and object, the kind of state regularly called "emptiness" in Mahayana Buddhist thought. Roy deals primarily with these two forms of consciousness-in (especially consciousness A) and states that one of his main objectives is to show that it is not only Eastern thinkers who have recognized and written about them. As he says in the final paragraph of the book, "I hope I have demonstrated that, contrary to what is commonly believed, numerous thinkers in the West have delved into the riches of those human discoveries" (191). Roy's attempted demonstration beginswith asurveyofWestern philosophies of consciousness (part 1 of the book, consisting of three chapters), proceeds through a fairly detailed consideration of three "classic" Western thinkers (part 2, with chapters on Plotinus, Eckhart, and Schleiermacher), and concludes in part 3 with "a dialogue with Zen philosophy," consisting of paired chapters on Western and Japanese views of the self (chapters 7 and 8) and a second paired set on Western and Japanese views of nothingness. In his opening two chapters Roy treats Western...