Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism: Ascent and Awakening by Yongho Francis Lee (review)

Many scholars of Christian mysticism have been exposed to the tradition whereby mental prayer works as a prelude to a form of contemplative prayer that jettisons the natural use of the cognitive faculties. Gregory of Nyssa frames the silencing of the intellect as entering the "dark cloud" as Moses did on the top of Mount Sinai to meet God directly. John of the Cross describes the necessity of entering into the active and passive nights of the spirit if one is to hope for mystical union. In this tradition, thinking becomes an obstacle and the mind's conceptualizing activities have to be, as St. John would put it, "denuded." The Buddhist Chan (Zen) tradition has much of the same insistence. Bodhidharma, Chan's patriarch, insisted that enlightenment was "a special transmission outside the scriptures, not founded on words or letters." One may imagine that in both traditions it is clear that since the ultimate boon transcends the conceptual world, conceptualizing has to be stifled and, perhaps, even distained. But is this necessarily true, or could there be another kind of collaboration, another kind of synthesis?

Yongho Francis Lee's Mysticism and Intellect in Medieval Christianity and Buddhism investigates two giants of the tradition: Bonaventure, the great scholar and mystic of the early Franciscan movement, and Chinul, the highly influential Korean Son (Chan) master and scholar. Both lived in the thirteenth century and in controversy regarding the nature of holiness and how it is attained. And both wrestled with the relationship between intellect and spiritual advancement. Lee's study has several aims. The first is simply to better understand these two very different religions generally. The second is to demonstrate the complexity of religious life as it manifests itself in the theology and practice toward extraordinary religious goals. And finally, as a piece of comparative theology, Lee sees placing them next to each other as an opportunity to see what one might learn from the comparison for deepening one's own theological and spiritual life.

Bonaventure had to negotiate several complicated issues. As the Franciscan movement flourished, it was obvious that friars needed to be trained theologically. St. Francis had conceded the point but was ambivalent about the pursuit of knowledge as a potential attachment and a straying from the kind of simplicity of life and preaching both he and the early order advocated. Bonaventure had to negotiate a fine line. On the one hand, the relatively unlettered Francis was his hero. Further, as noted above, it seems that the highest mysticism was anti-intellectual or non-intellectual. On the other hand, he decidedly placed himself in the camp that justified learning as that which facilitated sanctity rather than threatened it. Core Franciscan elements at the time included seeing the world as a mirror and image of God and deep Christocentrism. Lee focuses on Bonaventure's masterful Soul's Journey into God whereby the journey aims at mystical union. The first six chapters of the Itinerarium correspond to how one could progressively experience the divine through the medium of the created world and the nature of one's own faculties. These meditations, and they are complicated indeed, lead the soul to contemplation of the Divine Being variously. Bonaventure's final chapter reveals how the mind comes to Jesus Christ. It is here where the soul finds "mysteries that surpass the power of the human intellect…[here] where affection must play a dominant role. Now the mind enters into the divine darkness through death with Christ by silencing all our cares, desires, and imaginations" (42).

Chinul's Korean Buddhist world was filled with the same issue: the role of the intellect in enlightenment. In contest were various schools of Buddhism that emphasized texts, learning, and meditational practices that relied on them. Lee shows how these schools often challenged each other in what amounts to theological disputes. But more to the point was...