Mystics: Presence and Aporia (review)

This collection, which the editors suggest evolved from a seminar on negative theology taught by Jean-Luc Marion and David Tracy at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago, could well have been so dominated by the translation of Jean-Luc Marion's already famous essay "Saint Thomas d'Aquin et l'onto-théo-logie" (1995), that all the other essays in the volume would function as afterthoughts. Fortunately, this does not happen. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons is that supplied by the editors in their preface, namely the interdisciplinary nature of the project, in which not only philosophy and theology but also the disciplines of history and literature are represented. In this sense, it is the ethos of the University of Chicago itself that prevents a hegemonic voice. It is definitely the interdisciplinary culture that determines beforehand the avoidance of mysticism in or as the title. The editors argue that the term "mysticism" is, at the very least, unhelpful, in that it suggests something like an essence, and potentially misleading to the extent to which it has come to connote some privileged experience and esoteric access to a reality, along with the induction or production of a special cadre of human being of exquisite spiritual talent. Accordingly, they recommend the substitution of "mystics," which they argue is both more plural and punctiliar in its meaning. Still, this methodological decision would not in itself suffice to prevent the hegemony of one voice without the kind of insistent intelligence, capacious knowledge, and felicity of expression that is characteristic of all of the essays. Finally, it is the quality of these other essays that ensures that Marion's piece anchors rather than sinks the text.

Although the editors emphasize the interdisciplinary structure of the text, the text is in fact organized chronologically, beginning with Alexander Golitzin's brilliant essay on Pseudo-Dionysius and ending with Thomas Carlson's piece on the self as it undergoes the trials of the postmodern condition. As the editors say in the preface, and as David Tracy underscores in the afterword, Mystics limits itself to the Christian tradition and its modern and postmodern aftereffects, while leaving open the possibility that the kind of discussion carried out might provide a template for similar discussions with respect to Judaism and Islam. I will return to the issue of whether chronology is more than an ad hoc device in due course, but whatever the verdict in this case, palpably there are unities of theme that help bind the text together. Themes that stand out include the history of mystical discourse and life and aporia of their meaning, the relation between experience and its religious and/or post-religious interpretation, the relation of so-called mystical experience and its interpretation to practice and to politics, and the relation of both to the discourses of postmodernity on the one hand, and to the discourse of the feminine, on the other.

The collection can be read as structured by four pairs. One pair is constituted by the essays of Marion and Carlson. As the former inscribes Aquinas in a counter-history of discourses deemed capable of leading us beyond forms of thought that master and command phenomena, the latter inscribes Johannes Scotus Eriugena in this same history. Another pair is constituted by the essays of Amy Hollywood and Kevin Hart, which treat the category of experience, as linked to the categories of mysticism and negative theology, in the work of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot respectively. Arguably, the category of experience is also a main concern of both François Meltzer's essay on Joan of Arc and Susan Schreiner's essay on Luther and Theresa of Avila. Here, however, the specific focus is the relationship between experience and interpretation: in the case of Joan the relationship between her experience and the interpreting legal proceedings, and in the case of Luther and Theresa, as one would expect, between experience and scripture, on the...