The art of mysticism : an inquiry into the notion of ineffability in (cataphatic) mystical experience

Mystical experience, which William James called ineffable, can be understood through the lens of art and aesthetics. Focusing on Western Christian mysticism, the author argues that positive (cataphatic) mystical experience resembles an artistic or aesthetic experience in its phenomenology and psychology. The imagination plays a crucial role in realizing the presence of God, which is represented pictorially in the mystical imagination like a painting on the canvas of the soul. Using Kant's philosophy, the author contends that the consciousness of divinity is an aesthetic realization, and that mystics can and do articulate this experience through language and figures of speech, making their claims of ineffability problematic.

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Abstract

One of the defining characteristics of mystical experience posited by the psychologist and pragmatist philosopher William James in 1902 is that of ineffability, or indescribability. In this thesis my aim is to inquire into this notion of ineffability, indeed to problematize its understanding, by relating it to concepts of art and aesthetics. It is a preliminary attempt to apply the terminology of these fields in a direct analogous way to the mystical state. In short, I want to demonstrate that the mystical experience is like an artistic and aesthetic experience, in its phenomenology and psychology. My focus is on western Christian mysticism. Initially, I shall clarify my approach as dealing mainly with cataphatic, or positive mystical experience, as against apophatic, or negative mystical experience—although the demarcation cannot be absolute since there is a dialectical relationship between these particular modes. I introduce the terms ‘happenstance’ consciousness and ‘desire-laden’ consciousness, which roughly correspond to nature mysticism and theistic mysticism. The spiritual perception of God can be understood in terms of a metaphorical transposition of the mundane perception that is ordinarily involved with cognition of the world, and in this respect I appeal to the idea of the spiritual senses. I posit a distinction between the awareness of divinity, as the perceptual ‘event’, and the consciousness of divinity, as the imaginary ‘experience’, although acknowledging that it can only be a relative one. In positive (cataphatic) mystical consciousness, the imagination is of profound importance, as a means for realizing the presence of God; and accordingly, I shall survey ancient and modern thinking on the role of imagination and phantasy up to the eighteenth century. The work of Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87) presages a shift to non-imagistic propositional thinking about consciousness, one in which the imagination is a productive mechanism that works in conjunction with the understanding to make a judgement based on (empirical) experience. I interpret Kant analogically and metaphorically in order to argue that the mystical encounter with the noumenal God involves a perception of divine light by the sensible intuition of the soul, by dint of the spiritual senses, which is then represented phenomenally in the imaginary, and realized as the presence of God. This constitutive judgement means that the consciousness of divinity is available to be enunciated, and in that regard it demonstrates a recognition of God’s presence. In the event of contemplating God mystics are intuitively drawing the outline of divinity (circumscribing the rounded light of divinity), and in this way the invisible God is pictorially represented in the mystical imagination, where it is coloured by the understanding. Divinity is painted on to the canvas of the soul. It is a work of art, and the result of a creative enterprise. As painted by means of the light of God, the divine presence is perspectivally realized, compositionally formed, and colourfully relieved by the mystical imaginary. The experience of God’s being can finally be rendered as a tangible artwork, which is to say, enunciated, through the act of speaking and/or writing. One of the hallmarks of mystical consciousness is the sense of the beautiful and sublime nature of divinity. Utilizing Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790/93) I argue that the consciousness of divinity is tantamount to an aesthetic realization, and it is by virtue of the reflecting power of judgement that mystics are able to discern the presence of God. Further inquiry reveals that mystical experience as it is realized by an affective consciousness has some affinity with twentieth-century theories of aesthetic experience. Phenomenologically, the imaginary presence of God is an object that exhibits certain aesthetic properties or qualities—with love and beauty being paramount ones—and the medium by which the ‘ineffable’ consciousness is made manifest is through the use of tropical language (figures of speech), in the enunciation. Ultimately, I argue that mystics are bound to articulate the experience of divinity, since it connotes a recognition of that presence of God which is realized in the imaginary; and thus, their protestations about ineffability are problematic.