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  • Mysticism’s Threat to Doctrine
  • Robert Pasnau (bio)

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.”1

One 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 [End Page 215] 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 away such silence is itself away 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...

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