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Mysticism and Mysticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2024

Victor White O.P.
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Extract

Professor Zaehner’s new book is most timely, and—to anybody with any interest in the subject, from whatever point of view—quite absorbing. It is also a pioneer work, for although the study of ‘comparative mysticism’ is not totally new, the little that has hitherto been written about it has been mainly from an a priori standpoint with little regard for the actual records. Moreover, such writing has often been based on assumptions, or wishful thinkings, of very doubtful validity. At one extreme is the assumption that all ‘mystical experiences’ are essentially identical, whether they be of Christians, Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Wordsworthian Romantics, drug-takers or schizophrenics. At the other, that only Catholics (or Hindus, or Moslems, or the clinically sane, etc.) have authentic mystical experiences, and that all the rest are frauds, delusions, or at best purely natural phenomena from which any intervention of God’s grace must at all costs be excluded. The outstanding merit of Professor Zaehner’s book is its rigorous empiricism, its careful scrutiny and comparison of the plain facts, which can only be the testimonies of the mystics themselves, or those who have been called such. Even as a collection of texts, and apart from his own thoughtful comments, hypotheses and deductions, this is a most valuable book.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 38 , Issue 448-449 , August 1957, pp. 301 - 310
Copyright
Copyright © 1957 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 Mysticism Sacred and Profane. An Inquiry into some Varieties of Preternatural Experience, by R. C. Zaebner, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press; 42s.).

2 The Menace of MescahV, Biacktriahs, July, 1954, pp. 310 ff.

3 Published by Gollancz, 1957.

4 Proceedings of the Round Table on LSD and Mescaline in Experimental Psychiatry, May 12, 1955. cd. Louis Cholden, M.D. (Grune and Stratton).

5 See St Augustine's De Trinitate, St Thomas's Summa, i, 87, 93, and the classical treatment by A. Gardeil, o.p., La structure de rime et Vexpirience mystique.

6 He also calls it ‘natural’, not as distinct from supernatural, but because experiences of this type are directly concerned with the phenomena of external nature.

7 S. Dasgupta, Yoga as Philosophy and Religion, p. 26.

8 It seems disingenuous to say that ‘it makes no difference’ whether we render Shankara's atman as ‘self’ or ‘Self’ because ‘in Sanscrit there are no capital letters’. The fact is surely that in Sanscrit there is no lower‐case, but only capital letters?

9 Vivekachudamani (tr. Madhavananda), 242 (p. 108).

10 Contra Gentiles, IV, Prologue.

11 Proverbs, 8. 30, 31.

12 Oti the Divine Names, 4.

13 Summa, II‐II, 180, 6.

14 But, though God is good‐in various analogical senses which Jewish and Christian theologians discuss‐he is indeed beyond the opposite;, i.e. beyond good‐and‐evil,. as theologians and mystics of all traditions must agree.

15 Summa, II‐II, 180, 2; 182, 3.

16 Summa, I, 4, 5, etc.

17 Summa, I, 13, 10 ad 5.

18 Summa, I, 12, 13, ad 1.

19 See Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, chap. iv. and passim. Cf. G. R. Levy‐on the ‘Revolution’ of religion by the Hebrew prophets, The Gate of Horn, pp. 196 ft.

20 John 14. 6.

21 St Thomas says that there is a right and a wrong way of seeking to be Godlike: God's way (God made man ‘to be in his own likeness’) and Satan's (‘You shall be as God’). Satan himself ‘desired to be like God the wrong way, for he desired as his ultimate aim that bliss which he could reach by the power of his own nature, turning his desire away from that supernatural bliss which comes from God's grace. Or [like Rimbaud!] he sought to attain by the powers of his own nature that ultimate goal of Godlikencss which in fact is given by grace, but to do so without God's help or in the measure of God's giving…. Either way, it comes to much the same thing, for either way he sought final bliss, which is God's alone, through his own strength.’‐Summa, I, 63, 3.

22 Cf. the ‘own dharma’ of Bhagavadgita, 2.

23 T. S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday.