Abstract
“The mystical” as an expression, in the sense I use it here, stems from Angela Ales Bello who proposed it as a translation of the German term “Mystik.” The mystical is not to be confused with mysticism, because the meaning of the latter is more ambiguous than that of the former. The mystical is a sui generis phenomenon which opens a genuine connection with reality without destroying, dissolving, or eliminating the human persons involved. The mystical has a long history reaching back to times immemorial; however, a more concrete development is detectable in Western history, where the mystical shows a peculiar evolution. In this evolution, the unique historic occurrence of Auschwitz—as the realization of “historic evil”—has a central place. As Jewish and Christian reflections convincingly show, the experience of historic evil fundamentally changed the history of mysticism. Auschwitz underpinned the special character of the mystical and helped humanity to leave behind the earlier, confused and inarticulate kinds of mysticism.
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Notes
- 1.
Schindler, Pesach: Hasidic Responses to the Holocaust in the Light of Hasidic Thought, Ktav Publishing House, Hoboken: New York, 1990.
- 2.
Walther, Gerda : Phänomenologie der Mystik . Olten und Freiburg: Walter, 1976.
- 3.
See Kittel—Friedrich (eds): Theological Dictionary of The New Testament . Translator and editor Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1980–1982.
- 4.
To my knowledge as yet, there is no reliable scholarly work on a universal history of mysticism. What we possess are rather case studies and comparative analyses of certain works, persons, or developments, or again expositions of a certain, rather philosophical perspective of mysticism. With this in mind, the works of William James, Evelyn Underhill, or W. T. Stace are useful sources. See also the introductory parts of Randall Studstill’s The Unity of Mystical Traditions (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005).
- 5.
See the discussion in Studstill, op. cit., 5 ff.
- 6.
James, William : Varieties of Religious Experience, New York: Torch Books 1958, 299 ff.
- 7.
Haas, Alois M.: Mystik als Aussage: Erfahrungs-, Denk- und Redeformen christlicher Mystik. Frankfurt-Leipzig: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2007.
- 8.
Studstill, op. cit., 1, fn. 1; Stace, W. T.: Mysticism and Philosophy, London: Macmillan, 16 ff. Jones, Richard H.: Mysticism Examined. New York: SUNY Press, 1996, passim.
- 9.
See also my analysis in B. Mezei: Vallásbölcselet, Gödöllő: Attractor, 2005, vol. I, 2. §.
- 10.
See the intertwining of religions in mystical experience , Hick, John: Between Faith and Doubt. Dialogues on Religion and Reason. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 39–40.
- 11.
See Ales Bello, Angela: The Divine in Husserl and Other Explorations. Berlin-New York: Springer, 2008, 68 ff. McAlister, Linda Lopez: Gerda Walther, in: Waithe, M.E. (ed.), History of Women Philosophers, vol. 4, 189–406. See also Steinbock, Anthony: Phenomenology and Mysticism. The Verticality of Religious Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007, 28. – However, Steinbock does not seem to have recognized the unique character of Walther’s importance in a phenomenology of mysticism.
- 12.
Ales Bello: op. cit., 76. She notes too that Hedwig Conrad-Martius, one of the Munich phenomenologists, encouraged Walther to republish her work on the mystical in the 1950s.
- 13.
McAlister: op. cit., 198 ff.
- 14.
Gerda Walther: op. cit., 22. My emphasis.
- 15.
Walther: op. cit., 182.
- 16.
Op. cit., 202.
- 17.
Op. cit., 209.
- 18.
I am aware of the difficulty of this claim in view of important works of comparative religion and metaphysics. However, the argument I propose underpins the claim, for it is only in Western mysticism that we have a well formed notion of human personhood and a corresponding notion of God as well.
- 19.
See e.g. Mark 12:14.
- 20.
See for details Mezei, B. M.: Religion and Revelation after Auschwitz , New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 194: “[Robert] Spaemann belongs to the few contemporary thinkers who have a unified understanding of human personhood as evolving from the Hellenistic and biblical sources and reaching new forms throughout the history of Western thought. For Spaemann, human persons are ultimate unities, a fact earlier thinkers did not see as distinctly as we do today.”
- 21.
Glasenapp, Helmuth von : Die fünf grossen Religionen. Düsseldorf: E. Diederich, 1951. Immanuel Kant : The Critique of Pure Reason . Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, B 659/A 631.
- 22.
Assmann, Jan : Monotheismus und Kosmotheismus: Ägyptische Formen eines “Denkens des Einen” und ihre europäische Rezeptionsgeschichte. Heidelberg: Winter, 1993.
- 23.
Cumont, Franz: Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans. New York: Dover Publications, 1960, 79–80.
- 24.
See Mezei 2005, op. cit., vol. II, 65. §, fn. 900. And by the same author: Mai vallásfilozófia, Budapest: Kairosz, 2010, 174 ff.
- 25.
St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa theologica. Benziger Bros. edition, 1947. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Published in Christian Ethereal Library: http://www.ccel.org/ccel/aquinas/summa, Second Part of the Second Part, q. 180, a. 6. (“Whether the operation of contemplation is fittingly divided into a threefold movement, circular, straight and oblique?”, accessed 5/5/2015). Pseudo-Dionysius : The Complete Works. Transl. Colm Luibheid; foreword, notes, and translation collaboration by Paul Rorem; preface by René Roques; introductions by Jaroslav Pelikan, Jean Leclercq, and Karlfried Froehlich. New York: Paulist Press, 1987, p. 78.
- 26.
According to N. T. Wright, in 1 Cor. 15:47 St. Paul “is not buying into the cosmology of the Timaeus ; indeed, the way the entire chapter is built around Genesis 1 and 2 indicates that he is consciously choosing to construct a cosmology, and within that a future hope, from the most central of Jewish sources” (Resurrection of the Son of God, 346). The cosmology of the Timaeus may not have been a pattern for Paul, yet the general cosmo-theological view of the universe was natural for anyone living in the Hellenistic period. The analogy of the stars parallels the analogy of the seed. The two analogies have a common structure and a common point: Just as the seed produces the corn, and just as the stars have their splendor, also human beings are to receive their spiritual bodies from God after their bodies are decayed in the soil
- 27.
See Mezei 2013, op. cit., 6.
- 28.
Rubenstein, Richard: After Auschwitz : History, Theology, and Contemporary Judaism, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966. Richard Rubenstein, and John K. Roth, Approaches to Auschwitz: The Holocaust and its Legacy, Louisville and London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003.
- 29.
Jonas, Hans: Der Gottesbegriff nach Auschwitz , Stuttgart: Suhrkamp, 1987.
- 30.
Jonas, Hans: The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
- 31.
Jaspers, Karl: Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung, München und Zürich: Piper, 1962.
- 32.
Lévinas, Emmanuel: Totality and Infinity, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969. By the same author: Ethique et infini, Paris: Fayard, 1982.
- 33.
Jaspers, op. cit.
- 34.
Altizer, Thomas J. J.: The New Gospel of Christian Atheism, Aurora, CO.: The Davies Group, 2002, 69. Altizer, Thomas J. J.: Godhead and the Nothing. State University of New York Press: Albany, 2003, 35, 69, 105. For a detailed account of my critical assessment of Altizer’s view, see my forthcoming Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach (New York: Bloomsbury), especially the General Introduction.
- 35.
Altizer 2003, op. cit., 158.
- 36.
See Jonas 1984, op. cit.
- 37.
Metz, Johann Baptist: Memoria passionis. Ein provozierendes Gedächtnis in pluralistischer Gesellschaft, Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder, 2006.
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Mezei, B.M. (2017). The Mystical After Auschwitz. In: Vassányi, M., Sepsi, E., Daróczi, A. (eds) The Immediacy of Mystical Experience in the European Tradition. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45069-8_17
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