Contemporary Epistemology and the Study of Mysticism

The essay examines how different epistemologies and methodologies shape the study of mysticism, focusing on the limits of constructivism, an approach that emphasizes how mystical experience is shaped by its context—core texts, practices, social relations, and historical traditions. The author argues that while constructivism, as developed in collections edited by Steven T. Katz, clarifies some aspects of mysticism, it obscures others by privileging certain ways of looking. The essay aims to open up questions about where and how scholars investigate mystical traditions, suggesting that reliance on context may limit understanding of phenomena that resist contextual explanation.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Abstract What epistemologies and methodologies help us to understand the phenomena of mysticism? How do these epistemologies and methodologies clarify some aspects of these phenomena while obscuring or occluding other aspects? When we investigate mystical traditions, how and where do we look? Do we look only where we think there is more light to see? In this essay I would like to help open up these questions more by focusing especially on the limits of one influential contemporary approach, which emphasizes study of the contexts of mysticism-the core texts, practices, social relations, and historical traditions out of which a given form of mysticism develops-and the way that mystical experience is, at least in part, constructed on the basis of a particular background context. Such an approach has been recently developed in two collections of essays edited by Steven T. Katz. I will, following others in this volume, identify this approach as constructivism (although it is important to note that there are other contemporary variants of constructivism with differing assumptions).