Assuming he survived his experience, our hypothetical individual would undoubtedly emerge from it in a state of profound disorientation. When he had regained command of his faculties, he would want to know what had happened to him, what had produced that extraordinary moment of ‘otherness’. He could not gainsay the experience, could not dispute it or deny it, but he would be incapable of explaining what it meant, what it signified. At this point, there would arise the problem that attends any religious experience, any attempt to make sense of it, to establish its relevance to everyday existence and to society as a whole – the problem of interpretation.
Since he himself would have no framework or context to explain what he had undergone, we could offer our hypothetical individual an interpretation – which he would probably be inclined to accept for want of any alternative. We could tell him he had just established direct and immediate contact with the Great God Electricity. We could expound eloquently on the powers of this deity. We could explain how this deity provided us with an inexhaustible source of divine energy – which lit our homes and our cities and enabled us to turn night into day, which permitted us to receive magical sounds from the air through our radios and magical moving pictures through our televisions, which governed the functioning of our cars, our refrigerators, our telephones, our washing machines and all the other appliances and accoutrements of modern civilisation. We could then devise and adumbrate an elaborate theology based on the Great God Electricity. We could describe how the god should be propitiated and rendered docile. We could explicate and demonstrate how the god might be persuaded to serve us. And we could then send our hypothetical individual back to his own milieu, equipped with, say, a portable generator and the other apparatus required to introduce the god to his society.
In his own milieu our hypothetical individual could establish a cult without too much difficulty and install himself as high priest. With his portable electrical kit, he could ‘initiate’ those around him – perhaps many, perhaps an elect few – into his ‘mysteries’. For the majority, it would be sufficient simply to witness a friend, neighbour or relative getting ‘zapped’ by the new god. One would then readily accept the new god as an act of faith, without having to undergo the experience oneself.
By virtue of the power he had demonstrated and controlled, our hypothetical individual could impose his own theology – and with it his own cosmology, his own dogma, his own code of ethics, his own commandments, his own catalogue of sanctions and prohibitions. In the absence of any other, his interpretation would be regarded as definitive, and his authority would be absolute. Until one day, wandering in the forest during a thunderstorm, or flying a home-made kite as Benjamin Franklin supposedly did, some other individual might establish his own unique contact with the Great God Electricity, independent of the prevailing theology and dogma. He would discover that the experience itself was just that – an experience undergone at first hand, to which all the intellectual baggage, all the a posteriori interpretations, were irrelevant.
Suspicion of the Christian Mystics
This analogy may well appear frivolous. It does, however, serve to illustrate the distinction between the ‘religious experience’ on the one hand, and, on the other, the combination of faith and intellectual interpretation involved in ‘religion’. The ‘religious experience’ – which can indeed be equated with ‘spirituality’ – is above all an experience. It does not require or involve ‘belief’ or ‘faith’. It entails what the individual undergoing it at the moment can only apprehend as a form of direct and self-validating knowledge; and knowledge precludes any necessity for belief. If one knows, directly and immediately, one has no need to believe. If one touches one's hand to a hot stove or an open flame, one does not need to ‘believe’ in pain. Pain is experienced, immediately and directly, with an intensity that usurps the foreground of consciousness, preempting both belief and intellectual interpretations, rendering them irrelevant, secondary and subsequent to the direct apprehension or knowledge. During the first century or two of the Christian era, such direct apprehension was referred to as ‘gnosis’, which means simply ‘knowledge’. Those who sought or experienced ‘gnosis’ were called, or called themselves, ‘gnostics’. Today, we might call them mystics and ascribe their experience to a psychological dynamic or an ‘altered state of consciousness’. But whatever the terminology attached to it, there remains the raw and undiluted experience itself, dissociated from all rational interpretations appended after the fact.
In contrast, a religion is based not on ‘gnosis’, but on a theology, which is the intellectual interpretation attributed after the fact to the direct apprehension of ‘gnosis’. A theology attempts to explain the religious experience, to determine what the experience ‘means’ – even though it may ‘mean’ nothing at all, at least in intellectual terms. Theologies involve dogma, articles of faith, moral codes, prohibitions and sanctions, rites and rituals. The more complex and elaborate these things become, the more divorced and dissociated they become from the original experience that initially inspired them. Eventually, a theology loses all contact with the original experience and becomes an intellectual edifice in its own right, self-justifying and self-sufficient. The religion based on such a theology no longer has anything to do with ‘spirituality’. It has been transformed into nothing more than an instrument for conditioning and control. It is then merely a social, cultural and political institution, responsible for legislating morality and maintaining – or in some cases challenging – civic order. And for the hierarchical power structure presiding over such an institution, ‘gnosis’ constitutes a threat, because it renders the power structure superfluous. In order to protect the power structure, its custodians must turn themselves into Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor.
The theology and the organised religion based upon it are represented by the priest. The religious experience is represented by the mystic. The priest promulgates faith and traffics in intellectual dogma, in the business of interpretation and codification. In short, he deals with the exoteric dimension of what is generally called the ‘spiritual’; and all too often this dimension ceases to be ‘spiritual’ in the process, becoming instead a matter of docile belief accepted at second hand, or of rationality and intellectuality. In contrast, the mystic confronts the esoteric, the private or personal or ‘hidden’ dimension of the ‘spiritual’. He undergoes it as an experience and apprehends it as a form of direct knowledge, with an intensity and an immediacy that preempt both interpretation and belief.
Given these distinctions, it is hardly surprising that most established and organised religions tend to be nervous about their own mystical traditions, about the mystics among their congregations. The mystic always remains a potential maverick, a potential renegade or apostate, a potential heretic – and therefore a potential candidate for persecution. Because of his insistence on direct experience, he does not require or even necessarily want a priest as interpreter. In effect, the mystic renders the priest and the entire ecclesiastical hierarchy superfluous. And the mystics of the world's various religious traditions will generally have more in common with each other than any of them will with their own official priesthoods. The esoteric experience of the mystic involves a common denominator, a common psychological dynamic. The exoteric theology of a priesthood will invariably differ from those of other, rival priesthoods – and the difference will often culminate in violence. Throughout human history, believers have waged war against one another. Gnostics or mystics have not. People are only too prepared to kill on behalf of a theology or a faith. They are less disposed to do so on behalf of knowledge. Those prepared to kill for faith will therefore have a vested interest in stifling the voice of knowledge.
It was thus inevitable that Christian mystics, even those within the bosom of the Church, should find themselves regarded as suspect. And it was inevitable, in consequence, that some of them at least – those who bore conspicuous public witness to their experiences – should find themselves
subject to harassment and persecution. Such was the fate that befell the figure whom many would regard as the greatest mystic of the Middle Ages, Johannes Eckhart.
Eckhart – now generally known as Meister Eckhart – was born in Germany around 1260. Having entered the Dominican Order, he obtained a Master's degree from the University of Paris in 1302, and was appointed first Prior of Saxony two years later. In 1307, he was made head of all Dominican houses in Bohemia. In 1311, he was teaching theology at the University of Paris. He returned to Germany in 1313 and remained there as a teacher until his death in 1327.
Eckhart's vision was typically mystical. Although he lectured on theology, his own mystical experiences had convinced him that nothing, ultimately, was separate from God. God encompassed, subsumed and suffused the entirety of creation, including humanity. In other words, there was no distinction between God and man. To convey his sense of the omnipresence of the divine, Eckhart coined the famous term ‘Istigkeit’, which can best be translated as ‘is-ness’. In extolling the supremacy of such personally experienced immanence, he explicitly rejected all ‘external cult’.
To the Inquisitors among his fellow Dominicans, as well as to the presiding Archbishop of Cologne, Eckhart's statements appeared dangerously close to a form of pantheism, which was deemed heretical. Indeed, Eckhart was suspected of being secretly in league with certain heretical sects condemned precisely because of their pantheism. In 1326, complaints were made to the Pope that Eckhart was preaching erroneous doctrine, and a special Inquisitor was appointed to investigate the allegations. As things transpired, the Inquisitor proved to be mystically oriented himself and sympathetic to Eckhart's vision. A prolonged controversy erupted between Eckhart's critics and his supporters, and his case dragged on for the better part of a year, into 1327. Before it could be resolved, Eckhart himself died, but the proceedings continued for two years after his death. At last, in 1329, his teachings were officially adjudged to contain seventeen examples of heresy and eleven of suspected heresy. Only through complicated legal wrangling was he spared the posthumous indignity of having his remains exhumed and burned.
In England the Inquisition did not operate and possessed no permanent tribunals. During the trials of the Templars, which coincided with Meister Eckhart's career, Inquisitors had to be brought into the country from abroad, only to be received with a distinctly frosty welcome and, at best, grudging cooperation. In consequence, an English mystical tradition was able to flourish, and mystics such as Mother Juliana (or Julian) of Norwich were left unmolested. Yet even English mystics recognised the inimical mentality of the Inquisition. Among the most important of English mystical texts is the anonymously authored fourteenth-century work, The Cloud of Unknowing, which contains statements that are often virtually interchange-able with those of Meister Eckhart. Like Eckhart, The Cloud of Unknowing exhorts the reader that ‘yes, you and God are so one that you… may in a sense truly be called divine’.1 And, further:
The humility engendered by this experiential knowledge of God's goodness and love I call perfect… For sometimes people well advanced in the contemplative life will receive such grace from God that they will suddenly and completely be taken out of themselves and neither remember nor care whether they are holy or sinful.2
But from the safety of Inquisition-free England, The Cloud of Unknowing could dare to be explicit in condemnation of the Inquisitors, even going so far as to castigate them as agents of the infernal:
Again, the fiend will deceive some people with another insidious plot. He will fire them with a zeal to maintain God's law by uprooting sin from the hearts of others… he incites them to assume the role of a zealous prelate supervising every aspect of the Christian life… he maintains that the love of God and the fire of fraternal charity impel him. But really he lies, for it is the fire of hell in his brain and imagination that incites him.3
If English mystics escaped persecution unscathed, those in Spain attracted particularly assiduous attention from the Inquisition there. Despite this, however, Spain seems to have fostered mysticism on a scale unequalled elsewhere in western Europe. Indeed, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a veritable epidemic of mysticism occurred in Spain. Those who had supposedly succumbed to the ‘infection’ were known collectively as ‘Alumbrados’, which translates as ‘Illuminati’.
It is important to recognise that the Spanish Alumbrados were quite different from the later, eighteenth-century Illuminati of Bavaria. Unlike their subsequent German namesakes, the Spanish Alumbrados were not an organised and hierarchically structured secret society dedicated to social or political revolution. On the contrary, they were merely a number of disparate individuals, most of whom had no formal contact with one another and no programme or agenda. Some of them had unquestionably undergone the ‘altered state of consciousness' that constitutes the mystical experience. Others, without having undergone it, simply believed in the supremacy of the mystical experience over the conventional act of faith – and in so doing performed their own, somewhat less conventional, act of faith. In any case, and whatever their first-hand experience or lack of it, the Alumbrados would characteristically speak of an inner light, of the unity of all creation, of the oneness of man with God, of the need to abandon oneself to all impulses deemed to be divine in origin. In many respects, their statements echo those of a much older and more organised heresy, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, which had been prevalent in Germany, Flanders and Holland since the Middle Ages. Holland, of course, was the Spanish Netherlands at the time. During the sixteenth century, it was occupied and devastated by Spanish troops. It is not impossible that principles originating with the Brethren of the Free Spirit found their way back to Spain with the returning soldiery.
The Spanish Inquisition was particularly severe with Alumbrados. All Alumbrado writings were placed on the Index. In 1578, the Inquisition modified its official declaration of faith in order to label a number of Alumbrado assertions as heresy and theological error. From then on, the persecution of Spanish mystics acquired a new momentum and ferocity. More lenient penalties – fines, penances, imprisonment, even torture – began increasingly to lead to the stake.
Probably the most celebrated Spanish mystic of the period is Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada, better known today as Santa Teresa de Jesus or Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–82). Born into a noble family, Teresa received a modicum of formal education, which enabled her to spend much of her girlhood immersed in chivalric romances – the kind of romances that Cervantes would satirise in Don Quixote some three-quarters of a century later. These were soon to be replaced as her literary fare by devotional works. Throughout her life, Teresa was plagued by a number of nervous illnesses which affected her both physically and psychologically and which may have included a form of epilepsy. In the Spain of her time, her unstable health would have disqualified her from a secular existence of marriage and childbearing. In any case, she felt a religious calling and in 1535, at the age of twenty, entered a Carmelite convent at Ávila. Twenty years later while praying in a chapel, she underwent her first mystical experience. From then on, the mystical or visionary experience – what she herself called ‘the rapture’ – was to be a regular and recurring feature of her life.
On the advice of her confessors, she composed an autobiography which described her experiences. The Inquisition forbade its publication during her lifetime, perhaps fearing that a cult might grow up around her, like that which had grown up around Saint Francis two and a half centuries before. Instead, Teresa was allowed to pursue her desire for a simpler and more austere lifestyle by founding a convent of her own. She called her sisterhood the Discalced – that is, Barefoot – Carmelites. From within their cloister, she continued to write. She completed her autobiography, describing the successive stages whereby union with God was attained as ‘mansions’. She wrote an account of the foundation of her convent, which was soon to have some seventeen sister houses. She produced a spiritual guide for the nuns of her Ord
er and a manual of spiritual exercises. She also produced an impressive corpus of poetry. Of her copious correspondence, more than 400 letters survive.
Later commentators have made much of the erotic nature of Teresa's mystical experiences. With strikingly explicit sexual imagery, for example, she will describe herself as being ‘ravished’ by a divine lover, or by divine love; and her ecstasy will sometimes convey the impression of a spiritual – or spiritualised – orgasm. There is unquestionably a pathological element to Teresa's mysticism, which a Freudian would ascribe to the sublimation of repressed sexuality. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce her mysticism to nothing more than that. The mystical experience and the erotic experience have always been closely related in their psychological dynamics, and each has often expressed itself in the imagery of the other. Behind Teresa's sexual imagery, there remains an experience which mystics of all ages, of all religious traditions, have consistently endeavoured to express, even the most sexually well adjusted. Thus, for instance, Teresa describes how, during her state of ‘rapture’, the soul is dissolved in God, to a point at which all distinction is eradicated. The soul, God says to her, ‘dissolves utterly… to rest more and more in Me. It is no longer itself that lives; it is I.’4
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