From Prudence to Morality for Archiv für Religionsgeschichte Volume 9

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In general, the individual essays are unified by the central guiding question, how do mystics’ views of ethics (contained, e.g., in the set of values they profess andpractice) relate to their views of mystical experience? The discussions in thisanthology approach the central question in diverse ways as the scholars wrestle with the topic under suppositions of different conceptions of mysticism,different notions of morality, and with yet another set of ideas how these twomight be related—or not related. Generally speaking, there seem to be fourtheoretical possibilities:1. The two are unrelated.2. Ethical behavior is a means to personal enlightenment.3. Mystical experience reinforces the mystic’s prior (tradition-specific) values.4. Mystical experience provides the mystic with a foundation for a transformedsystem of value. With the exception of Gellman’s analysis of classical Hasidic mysticism, all of the contributors deny (1) in the case of the particular mystics they consider.Given that morality is concerned with ‘value’, and that mystics frequently claimthat their experience gives them privileged access to ‘the good’, this may seemhardly surprising. Possibility (3) is consistent with the generally held view thatmystical experiences are largely

constructed

within the purview of specifictraditions; hence, the values and virtues mystics associate with enlightenmentare generally connected to the mystic’s religious tradition as well.

Indeed, itseems nearly self-evident that the effects of an experience of “union with thedivine” is going to be dependent upon one’s prior conception of the divine andits relation to morality and humanity. However, many mystics have drawnattention to specific, and sometimes radically non-traditional, values and virtues“arising from” the experience of enlightenment (4); in particular, they frequently highlight

universal

compassion and love, which crosses the boundaries of tradition. Moreover, many enlightened mystics have arrived at an understanding of ‘the good’ in such a way as to emboldened them to take up a stance of

hypernomianism.

Hope for any progress in this debate is held out only by careful analysis of the writings of the mystics themselves, the end towards which the individual essaysof this volume are directed. To help the reader, we offer very brief synopses of the articles:

3 This position has been championed by Steven Katz who has defended what he hasdescribed as the

conservative character

of mystical experience. Katz, Steven.

Mysticism and Religious Traditions.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. “Ethics and Mysticism” in

Foundations of Ethics

, edited by Leroy Rouner. Notre Dame University Press, 1983.“Ethics and Mysticism in Eastern Mystical Traditions”.

Religious Studies

28, pp. 253–267.

C. Wildberg/D. Zelinski, Introduction

Christopher Key Chapple (

Disciplines and Vows (Yamas and Vratas): How the Mystical Yields to the Ethical in Yoga and Jainism

) offers an account of William James’ notion of ‘conversion experience’ within the Yoga and Jain traditions andelucidates the moral precepts which are seen as both necessary for and perfectedby these experiences. Reflections on his own training in these traditions enrichhis explication.Steven Heine (

The Role of Repentance—or Lack of it—in Zen Monasticism

)explores the de-emphasis on social responsibility (i.e. repentance and regret) within Zen monasticism, which stressed “formless repentance” through thecultivation of an awareness of the inherent emptiness of all things. He concludes with an account of recent developments within contemporary JapaneseBuddhism which apply traditional Buddhist notions of ‘repentance’to Buddhistinstitutions and social practices.Beverly J. Lanzetta (

Contemplative Ethics: Intimacy, Amor Mundi and Dignification in Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich

) provides an illuminating conceptual excavation of the biographies of Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich which counters the academic opinion that mystics are prone towardsantinomianism and moral apathy. In contrast with the post-enlightened ethicalemphasis on individual liberty and rights, Lanzetta paints a picture of a contemplative “ethics of perfection” centering around virtues of prayer,selflessness, and loving compassion.Paul Heck (

Noble Character in Islam

) focuses on major Sufis from the early and classical stages of Islamic history. Heck provides a portrait of Sufism as a moral complement to Islamic legalism. While legalism demarcates moralconduct, Sufi mysticism addresses the cultivation of moral character expressedthrough a sincere attitude and a “hypernomian” perspective. Jerome Gellman (

Jewish Mysticism and Morality: Kabbalah and its Ontological Dualities

) deals with Jewish mysticism centered around the

kabbalah

and explorers two ontological dualities, man/woman and Jew/non-Jew, whichhe sees as inherent within Jewish mystical theology. After an analysis of how these dualities operate on a moral level in traditional

kabbalah

mysticism, heexamines some 20

century cases where they appear to be transcended. Heconcludes with an analysis of why Jewish mysticism lacked any developedunrestricted morality (i.e. moral values or norms which, at least in theory, apply equally to all humans).Russ Nieli (

Mysticism, Morality, and the Wittgenstein Problem

) argues that the

via negativa

solution is the best explanation for the existence of mystical themes within Wittgenstein’s

Tractatus.

Nieli continues to extract from Wittgenstein’searly works descriptions of three types of mystical experiences providing a vaguebut incorrigible sense of “the (ultimate) good”. He concludes with anexamination of the impact of James’

Varieties of Religious Experience

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

The shifting of the emotional centre brings with it, first, increase of purity. … thecleansing of existence from brutal and sensual elements becomes imperative.

In other words, an individual who has undergone the process of conversion feelsa compulsion and responsibility to move away from one’s base impulses anddevelop a more elevated, more ethical lifestyle. James cites the life and work of Walt Whitman as an example of a modern American saint, an individual he considers to have been touched andtransformed by conversion. He quotes William Bucke’s classic book,

Cosmic Consciousness

, in regard to Whitman:

His favorite occupation seemed to be strolling or sauntering outdoors by himself,looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. It was evident that these things gave him a pleasure far beyond whatthey give to ordinary people. … All natural objects seemed to have a charm for him. All sights and sounds seemed to please him. … He never spoke deprecatingly of any nationality or class of men, or time in the world’s history, or against any trades oroccupations—not even against any animals, insects, or inanimate things, not any of the laws of nature, nor any of the results of those laws, such as illness, deformity,and death. He never complained or grumbled either at the weather, pain, illness, oranything else.

Bucke writes about a link between immersion into cosmic consciousness and themoral life:

The prime characteristic of cosmic consciousness is a consciousness of the cosmos,that is, of the life and order of the universe. Along with consciousness of the cosmosthere occurs an intellectual enlightenment which alone would place the individualon a new plane of existence—would make him almost a member of a new species.To this is added a state of moral exultation, an indescribable feeling of elevation,elation, and joyousness, and a quickening of the moral sense, which is fully asstriking, and more important than is the enhanced intellectual power.

After citing Bucke’s descriptions of this relationship between conversion andethics, William James then makes a direct connection between Bucke’sarticulation of cosmic consciousness and the Yoga tradition. He writes that“In India, training in mystical insight has been known from time immemorialunder the name of yoga.”

Quoting Swami Vivekananda, he writes that in thehighest states of Yoga:

3 Ibid., p. 221.4 William Bucke,

Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind

,Philadelphia, 1901, pp. 182–186, as quoted in William James,

The Varieties of Religious Experience

, London: Collier Books, 1961, pp. 82–83.5 William Bucke,

Cosmic Consciousness

, p. 2, as quoted in James, p. 313.6 James, op. cit., p. 314.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

There is no feeling of I, and yet the mind works, desireless, free from restlessness,objectless, bodiless. Then the Truth shines in its full effulgence, and we know ourselves—for sama ¯dhi lies potential in us all—for what we truly are, free,immortal, omnipotent, loosed from the finite.

James notes that a profound religious experience can lead to the control of sexual impulses and sobriety, affirming similar statements in the

Yoga Su¯ tra.

This brings us to a discussion of the first of the two Indian philosophical andreligious traditions that we will explore in the course of this paper: Yoga.

Yoga Philosophy and Ethics

In the Yoga tradition, Sama ¯dhi comprises the core conversion moment. InPataÇjali’s

Yoga Su¯ tra

(ca. 200 C.E.), this is defined as a state where “one’sthoughts diminish and one becomes like a clear jewel, assuming the color of any near object, with unity among grasper, grasping, and grasped.”

In other words,one becomes transparent to one’s surroundings, blending in with and taking onthe qualities of others. Rather than applying one’s own standard to reality, onecan fully experience things as they present themselves. Such a person becomesliberated from the influences of past karma and can dwell moment by moment,adapting to circumstance and situation. From this experience, one feels a connectedness between oneself and other beings, which can bring a heightenedsense of responsibility and accountability. As a result, a desire to cultivate andabide by a higher moral standard, as suggested by Bucke, may ensue.Ethics plays a central, foundational role in the eightfold path outlined by PataÇjali. By the second century of the common era, PataÇjali had compiled anarray of practices under the philosophical umbrella of the Sa ¯m

khya metaphys-ical school and promulgated a system of Yoga that borrows from Vedic, Jaina and Buddhist schools of thought and practice. Unlike Sa ¯m

khya, and like Jainism, Buddhism, and the Dharmasha ¯stra materials of the BrahmanicalHindu tradition, PataÇjali emphasizes the importance of ethical practices in thepractice of Yoga, both in preparation for states of Sama ¯dhi and, in a sense, inaffective response to the experience of Sama ¯dhi. He suggests that one may cultivate “friendliness, compassion, happiness, and equanimity” as a means of achieving Sama ¯dhi.

He later lists five precepts that delineate the ethicalpractices of Yoga: nonviolence (

ahim

sa¯

), truthfulness (

satya

), not stealing

7 Swami Vivekanda,

Raja Yoga

, London, 1896, as quoted in James, p. 315.8

Yoga Su¯ tra

II:41, as translated in

The Yoga Su¯ tras of PataÇjali: An Analysis of the Sanskrit with Accompanying English Translation

by Christopher Chapple and Yogi Ananda Viraj(Eugene P. Kelly, Jr.), Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1990, p. 20.9

Yoga Su¯ tra

I:33.

C. Key Chapple, Disciplines and Vows

(

asteya

), sexual restraint (

brahmacarya

) and nonpossession (

aparigraha

Interestingly, this list predates PataÇjali by at least five centuries and formsthe core ethical system for the Jaina religious tradition, particularly as found inthe

A¯ ca¯ra¯n

ga Su¯ tra

(ca. 300 to 400 B.C.E.). In this presentation, I willintertwine a discussion of the ethics of both Yoga and Jainism as found in thesetwo texts. Additionally, I will explore the psychological and theological impetusfor the practice of these ethical precepts, as summarized in karma theory.The theory of karma in Hindu thought can be found in the Upanishads andthe Yoga tradition. One of the most technical accounts is contained in the

YogaSu¯ tra

, which specifies that karma comes in three colors (black, white, mixed),

and that all karma presents itself as vitiated with a combination of fiveimpurities or

kles ´ as.

PataÇjali lists these impurities as ignorance, egoism,attraction, repulsion, and clinging to life.

These five bind an individual withinrebirth (

sam

sa¯ra

) and a blind repetition of prior action based on conditioning seeds (

bı¯ ja

sam

ska¯ra

) deposited through routine, indiscriminate pursuit of desire. PataÇjali defines ignorance as

anitya as ´ uci duh

kha ana¯tmasu nitya s ´ uci sukha a¯tma¯ khya¯tir avidya¯

Ignorance is seeing the transient as intransigent,a sullied thing as pure,a painful experience as pleasure,and the ego as one’s true self.

Knowledge here refers not to knowing the size and shape of things but entails wisdom resulting from a process of introspection about the ultimate purpose of things. By seeing the evanescent quality of apparent reality, one develops theability to stand aloof from the drama of catching and holding without pause orreflection.This analysis extends to the ego itself. By noticing that the attributesthrough which an individual holds to a fixed sense of self generally are subject toconstant change, rigidity and fixity can be loosened. In the process, one comesto understand the twin dynamic of attraction and repulsion, the realm of opposites, of likes and dislikes, that often drives an individual to seek outpreferences and avoid discomforts without a depth of understanding. Thisinterplay of ignorance and ego, allurement and repulsion, repeats itself againand again, accustoming a person to a repetitive rhythm that lulls one into a

Yoga Su¯ tra

II:30–39.11

Yoga Su¯ tra

IV:7.12

Yoga Su¯ tra

II:12.13

Yoga Su¯ tra

II:3.14

Yoga Su¯ tra

II:5.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

sense of thinking the world could not be different or more important than a constant repeat of what has been played before.However, this ignorant worldview leads ultimately to discomfort. Ourbodies age, our friends and relatives may predecease us, our expectations in lifecan lead to disappointment. As an antidote, Yoga karma theory suggests that weseek out an understanding of the origins of things and their ultimate purpose.PataÇjali states:

Heyam

duh

kham

ana¯gatam

The pain of the future is to be avoided (through contemplation).

By examining the seed causes of repetitive behavior, one can anticipate andrestructure one’s comportment within the world and restructure one’s behaviorin a manner enhanced by dignity. In the first section of the

Yoga Su¯ tra

, PataÇjalistates that the practice of concentration can wear away the seeds of past action(

sam

ska¯ra

In the second section of the

Yoga Su¯ tra

, PataÇjali prescribescultivating the opposite (

prati-paksha-bha¯vanam

), literally, using the other wing.

The prime tool to achieve this goal can be found in the ethical practicesof the five great vows.PataÇjali’s

Yoga Su¯ tra

describes these vows in a series of six aphorisms. Hebegins with an assessment of the need to control one’s thoughts and actions,pointing out that if one does not abide by these precepts, suffering and endlessignorance will result:

Discursive thoughts like violence, etc., whether done, caused or approved,consisting in lust, anger, or delusion, and whether mild, medium, or intense,have as their endless fruits dissatisfaction and ignorance. Thus, cultivation of opposites is prescribed. (II:34)

He then states each of the five required practices, and indicates a benefit to eachone:

When in the presence of one established in nonviolence, there is the abandonmentof hostility. (II:35). When established in truthfulness, there is correspondence between action and fruit.(II:36). When established in nonstealing, whatever is present is all jewels. (II:37). When established in sexual restraint, vigor is obtained. (II:38). When steadfast in nonpossession, there is knowledge of “the how” of existence.(II:39).

Yoga Su¯ tra

II:16.16

Yoga Su¯ tra

I:50.17

Yoga Su¯ tra

II:34.

C. Key Chapple, Disciplines and Vows

Swami Jyotir Mayananda, a 20

century Yoga teacher who resided in PuertoRico and Florida for many years, has written that

An aspirant must be able to understand that every negative thought process must becontrolled the moment it emerges from the unconsciousness in the form of a tiny ripple. Just as a spark of fire can be easily crushed between one’s fingers, but, when itis allowed to grow, even the most advanced fire-extinguishing methods becomeineffective. Forests are consumed in blazing fire. In the same way, an evil thought- wave must be nipped in the very bud. It is easy to control it with the art of

Pratipaksha Bha¯vana.

But, when it is allowed to stay and grow in the mind, itassumes various perverse forms so that it is very, very difficult to recognize it, and itis further difficult to eradicate it. Thus, an aspirant must control and sublimateevery thought wave that promotes violence, falsehood, impurity, greed, discontent,and lack of devotion to God.

Through the control of thoughts by the practice of these five vows, a control of one’s thinking process emerges that enhances an ethical way of life. JyotirMayananda has given multiple reflections on how to practice each of these fivedisciplines, and quoted various others including Mahatma Gandhi and Ramana Maharshi regarding this topic. A few of his reflections are as follows:

When you keep your mind free from developing thoughts of hatred and anger evenunder provocative conditions, you are practicing mental non-violence.

There is nostrength greater than Truth. There is no wealth greater than Truth. By the pursuit of Truth, one acquires boundless willpower.

Stealing in the broad sense has many subtler implications. In its grossest expressions this vice manifests in thieves,robbers, swindlers and similar criminals. But it continues to exist in different formsin all people, until the Yogic insight eliminates it.

On the human level, lack of control in seeking sex-pleasures, and lack of the recognition of social and moralrestraint in sex-relationships, is an expression of degeneration and deterioration of personality.

…[W]hen a Yogi develops the quality of non-covetousness, hebecomes a true master of his possessions. He is no longer possessed by the objectsthat he possesses…. The virtue of non-covetousness holds manifold blessings for theindividual as well as the world outside. To the individual it opens the ever-increasing expansions of the Self; and to the world it promotes harmony, economic balance,love and understanding…

Swami Jyotir Mayananda has reflected on the broader ramifications of ethicalpractice and suggests an array of practical applications for non-violence,truthfulness, not stealing, sexual restraint, and nonpossession.

18 Swami Jyotir Mayananda,

Yoga of Sex-Sublimation, Truth & Non-Violence

(Miami,Florida: International Yoga Society, no date), pp. 22–23.19 Ibid., p. 3020 Ibid., p. 49.21 Ibid., p. 99.22 Ibid., p. 77.23 Ibid., p. 105.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

From 1973 until 1985, my wife and I lived within a small spiritualcommunity that practiced classical Yoga under the guidance of Gura ¯n

i AÇjali, a woman from Calcutta. At Yoga Anand Ashram in Amityville, New York,students in the applied method (

sa¯dhana)

classes are given a discipline and/orobservance to practice for the week. The first time I heard about this approachto spiritual practice was in conversation with Carole Zeiler in the Student Unionat the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1972. A member of the Ashram, she said that she had received her

sa¯dhana

in the mail, and she was topractice nonviolence or

ahim

sa¯

, which meant, among other things, that sheneeded to find cookies made without eggs! I became intrigued with the detail of this practice, which was my first introduction to dietary orthopraxy. Severalmonths later, after moving to Long Island, I entered a

sa¯dhana

class, and each week brought a new challenge. How could I make my life more austere? Weroutinely observed a weekly fast and weekly day of silence as an aspect of austerity (

tapas

). But what more could be done? We worked at not walking off with little things like pencils and or hording intangible things like time whilepracticing not stealing (

asteya

), another of the five ethical disciplines in the firststage of PataÇjali’s eightfold path. Truthfulness (

satya

), another discipline, wasalways a great challenge. How could I resist the temptation to exaggerate? Wasmy being in the world fully authentic?Though my wife and I shared these practices with one another, the bulk of our days were spent on a university campus where such topics were notappropriate to bring up in conversation. So we cultivated a life of ethicalintrospection rooted in PataÇjali’s yoga while engaged in our studies and campus jobs, enjoying the company of our fellow Yoga students while in class at nightand on the weekends. In little and big ways, we forged a different path than thatdictated by the culture, which, I think, was promoting disco dancing and thehustle. Perhaps the biggest culture gap came with the practice of nonpossession(

aparigraha

). For our teacher, this meant avoidance of debt. In India, lending policies have historically been draconian. Until recently, even houses were paidfor with cash. We came to value and stretch our meager resources and live a truly simple lifestyle that has carried over to a certain extent in our adult years.In order to give a sense of the day to day nature of the practice of ethics inthe Yoga tradition, I have found entries from some journals written in the1970 s and 1980 s.

Ahim

sa ¯. When I drive on the Parkway I sometimes look at other people. And I seethat they’re doing the same thing I am, using the same vehicles: automobile, senseand motor faculties. This example can be expanded to show that all people… are thesame. And once I see that sameness I’m living the Golden Rule and doing ahim

sa ¯.(1976)Satya is that part of me where I try to find words and yet I’m always questioning “Who do these words come from?” Is it possible for me to express my

sat

C. Key Chapple, Disciplines and Vows

(existence), my truth, my being, my philosophy in original form, without all I haveheard and read before? (1976) Asteya [is] physically not stealing, not taking, respecting others’ possessions. [Itis] mentally not stealing, not harboring belittling thoughts which diminish another’sself respect; not stealing space from another person’s mood. Spiritually, there isnothing outside of one’s self to steal. (1976) With Brahmacarya I see sexual thoughts and in seeing them and breathing I cancontrol them. (1976) Aparigraha or not possessing is freedom, freedom from clinging, freedom frombringing oneself down out of pure spirit into the psychological and physical. Andyet, freedom lies in the body and the workings of the mind, as it is through thesefaculties only that we experience freedom. (1976) Ahim

sa ¯, protecting bugs, seeing people.Satya, being firm with myself in the world; being honest with others and yettrying not to hurt them. Asteya, not taking time from others; not imposing myself.Brahmacarya: putting myself in situations of confrontation with thoughts. Thepurpose of brahmacarya on the physical level and the mental level is to conserveenergy; on the spiritual level it is to see all beings of both sexes as the same asoneself, to see the light within and not the gross alone. Aparigraha: appreciating and not grasping. ( 1976) Aparigraha is a beautiful discipline. I usually work on it the most before going to sleep and when I wake up in the morning. Through it, situations arediscriminated away until a silent space of non-possessiveness is felt, if only for a second. (1979)Satya. Through involvement with other, there is a release from self,simultaneous with naked honesty. (1980)

Reading this scant sampling from hundreds of pages of journal reflections, I amreminded of how the ethical mind can be cultivated through the practice of Yoga. Each week we would be assigned an ethical precept upon which to reflect. We were encouraged to post the word on the refrigerator, to repeat the wordagain and again, and to reflect and write about the experience. Sometimes we would be assigned a single practice for weeks on end. Other times we would beasked to write down the names of the five disciplines and pick a new one from a bowl each morning. The practice of these disciplines engages the memory. Istruggled at times to remember which discipline I was practicing. I had tostretch to apply the vow on some occasions. On other occasions, it stood by melike a cherished friend. By creating a groove through repeated returns to the word and its meaning, a new way of engaging in the world emerged. The“cultivation of opposites” gave me permission to confront my fears, tounderstand my pettiness, and in some instances transcend what I had alwaysassumed to be myself.In the Buddhist tradition, moral sensibilities arise via two avenues. The first,referred to as

apatrapa¯

, is practiced when others tell one to perform specificcorrect behaviors. The second, known as

hrı¯ ,

arises from the heart. One has

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

learned and interiorized the path of making the correct choice. Rather thanbeing imposed externally, this higher form of moral life arises from withinoneself, through one’s efforts.The cultivation of spiritual practice or

sa¯dhana

begins with instruction fromsomeone one respects and trusts. This person has dedicated herself or himself togiving advice to others based on personal experience. However, the actualexperience of that person, that teacher, is far less important than the willingnessof the

sa¯dhak

or spiritual practitioner to enter her or his own path. By taking thetools offered by a teacher, one takes the opportunity to reform, to remold, torefashion oneself. The daily or weekly practice of the five vows offers fertileground for the planting of new seeds. The thoughts engendered by theremembrance of nonviolence, for instance, automatically begin a process of deconditioning and reconditioning. In the training received by wife and myself,our circumstances themselves provided the context for our make-over. Ourmarriage, our work, and eventually our children all became the ground through which we were able to apply these principles and practices. As I later trained to become a theologian, I often have drawn from this early training, particularly within the area of ethics. For instance, in a book titled

Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions

, I attempt to apply the practice of the five great vows to environmental ethics:

The first vow,

ahim

sa¯

, requires respect for and protection of all life forms, stemming from the premise that even a blade of grass is not different from oneself in itsessential vitality. Advocates of vegetarianism claim that abstention from eating meatnot only spares the lives of animals, but also helps contribute to a healthy ecosystem.The third vow, not stealing, means that one abstains from taking what does notbelong to oneself. This can be particularly instructive for people of the ‘developed world’ who continue to consume the majority of the world’s resources, spewing forth pollution as a primary byproduct. The fourth vow, that of nonpossession, istacitly environmental… The less one owns, the less harm has been committed toone’s ecosphere. On a practical level, the fifth vow, sexual restraint, can be seen asone way to hold down population growth. Psychologically, it can be used as anexercise in post-patriarchal interpersonal relations, in which regarding other bodiesas potential objects for sexual gratification or the seeing of others as manipulable istransformed into seeing other people and other people’s bodies as not different fromoneself.

I have also employed reflection on the five great vows to other contexts in my professional life, such as protection of animals, responses to war, and theconduct of religious leaders. The application of these disciplines, rather thanappealing strictly to the rational faculty, calls up an affective response, a responsebuilt on memories of past practice and experiences. Numerous memory points

24 Christopher Key Chapple,

Nonviolence to Animals, Earth, and Self in Asian Traditions

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 71.

C. Key Chapple, Disciplines and Vows

become activated in the process of making ethical decisions. By engaging theideas and methods of the ancient yoga system as taught by traditional teachersfor hundreds of years, some new solutions to contemporary issues might befound.

Jainism and the Practice of Nonviolence

The Jaina tradition refers to the William James conversion moment as

samyak dr

s ˙t ˙i

, described as seeing things as equal or same. Both this term and the Hinduterm

sama¯dhi

contain a variation of the word

sama

or sameness as well as variantthat relates to vision (

dhı¯ , dr

s ˙t ˙i

). In both traditions, this experience can result ina profound change in a person. In the Yoga tradition, it is said that

sama¯dhi

canlead one to overcome past habits, eventually leading to a state of purity orseedlessness. In the Jaina tradition, it can enable one to progress up the ladder of spirituality (

s ´ reni

) toward the world of perfection (

siddha loka

). In bothHinduism and Jainism, we find extensive discussion of conversion, in the senseintended by William James. Having had a glimpse into the state variously known as cosmic consciousness

, sama¯dhi

, or

samyak dr

s ˙t ˙i

, one then assiduously pursues an internally inspired ethical course that transforms action frommundane repetition of personal preferences or cultural conformity into a concerted effort to recapture the inspiration felt in the state of cosmicconnectedness.In the Jaina tradition, the starting point for authentic spirituality begins with this moment of conversion. Dr. Padmanabh S. Jaini has described the stateof

samyak dr

s ˙t ˙i

, which is documented to last from a single instant up to forty-eight minutes, as a temporary experience of feeling liberated from all fettering karmas:

So great is the purity generated by this flash of insight that enormous numbers of bound karmas are driven out of the soul altogether, while future karmic influx isseverely limited in both quantity and intensity.

This moment entails a leaving behind of preoccupation with the body, withpsychological states, and with possessions. The gross forms of anger, pride,deceit and greed are “rendered inoperative.” One “no longer perceives things as‘attractive’ or ‘desirable’ but one penetrates to the fact that every aspect of life istransitory and mortal.”

. At this point a resolve sets in to change one’s lifestyleand to adopt the purposeful observance of the vows (

vrata

) of Jainism.

25 Padmanabh S. Jaini,

The Jaina Path of Purification

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 144.26 Ibid., p. 149

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

One anthropological account of this conversion experience has beendocumented by James Laidlow. He records a moment in the life of a woman who subsequently decided to become a Jaina nun:

The decision came one morning when she walked into the kitchen. There was a cockroach in the middle of the floor, “and I just looked at it and suddenly I thought,‘Why should I stay in this world where there is just suffering and death andrebirth?’”

This woman embarked on a changed life, renouncing her family, her name, any claims to wealth, all in order to begin a life of austerity designed to minimizeharm to all living beings.The earliest full account of the five precepts that govern and define the lifeof both practitioners of Yoga and of the Jaina faith can be found in the

A¯ ca¯ra¯n

gaSu¯ tra

, the oldest surviving Jaina text, which was composed before the commonera. Though the vows are identical to those listed above in the context of the

Yoga Su¯ tra

, this particular listing is more generous with its language thanPataÇjali. The

A¯ ca¯ra¯n

ga Su¯ tra

articulates the five great vows as follows:

I renounce all killing of living beings, whether subtle or gross, whether movable orimmovable. Nor shall I myself kill living beings, nor cause others to do it, norconsent to it.

I renounce all vices of lying speech arising from anger or greed or fear or mirth. Ishall neither myself speak lies, nor cause others to speak lies, nor consent to thespeaking of lies by others.

I renounce all taking of anything not given, either in a village or a town or a wood,either of little or much, of small or great, of living or lifeless things. I shall neithertake myself what is not given, nor cause others to take it, nor consent to their taking it.

I renounce all sexual pleasures, either with gods or men or animals. This vow alsoincludes the following: not to “continually discuss topics relating to women,” not to“regard and contemplate the lovely forms of women,” not to “recall to his mind thepleasures and amusements he formerly had with women”.

It also states that “a Nirgrantha does not eat and drink too much, or drink liquors or eat highly seasoneddishes” and that a “Nirgrantha does not occupy a bed or couch affected by women,animals, or eunuchs.”

27 James Laidlaw,

Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains

(Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 157.28 Herman Jacobi,

Jaina Su¯ tras Translated from Prakrit

(New York: Dover Publications,1968), p. 202. First edition published by Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1884.29 Jacobi, Ibid., p 204.30 Ibid.p. 205–206.31 Ibid., 20732 Ibid., p. 208.

C. Key Chapple, Disciplines and Vows

I renounce all attachments, whether little or much, small or great, living or lifeless;neither shall I myself form such attachments, nor cause others to do so, nor consentto their doing so.

Each of these five vows helps to encourage the monk, nun, or layperson to work diligently for self-perfection.By recognizing the inter-related nature of life, one develops a respect forother life forms. Mahavira himself, the fifth century teacher who standardized Jainism as it is practiced today, was considered a keen observer of nature:

Thoroughly knowing the earth-bodies and water-bodies and fire-bodies and wind-bodies, the lichens, seeds, and sprouts, he comprehended that they are, if narrowly inspected, imbued with life.

This perception of the beauty and complexity of nature formed the foundationfor the great teaching of non-violence (

ahim

sa¯

) that so aptly characterizes the Jaina faith.Mahatma Gandhi gave voice to an ethical path that transformed the history of the world. Gandhi enacted not only the liberation of India from colonialBritish rule but inspired the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1960 s. Gandhi had a conversion experience while being ejected from a trainin South Africa and from this jolt changed the political climate within the worldfor the latter half of the 20

century.Mahatma Gandhi built his campaign to free India of colonial rule in part with inspiration from his Jaina friends, most notably Rajchandra Bhai.Equipped with a resolve to be respectful to all beings, Gandhi explored all fivethemes in his work, most notably nonviolence (

ahim

sa¯

), holding to truth(

satyagraha

), sexual restraint (

brahmacarya

), and owning as little as possible(

aparigraha

). His selfless toil resulted in a free India and his core ideology shaped India’s self-identity and economic reforms until the liberalization of trade laws in the early 1990 s under Rajiv Gandhi. A core precept of Gandhian ethics is to examine oneself first. At a recentannual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Atlanta, one of Gandhi’s grandchildren told the story of a young mother who implored Gandhito tell her son, under doctor’s orders, to eat fewer sweets. Gandhi told her tocome back in a week, at which time he lectured the young man to good effect. When the mother asked why Gandhi needed to wait so long to deliver thisimportant message, Gandhi replied, “Why Madam, one week ago, I myself atesweets daily. Before I could hope to alter your son’s habits, I needed a week tocorrect my own excesses.” In other words, the moral life begins with one’s ownpatterns and practices.

33 Ibid., p. 20834 Ibid., pp. 80–81.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Conclusion

William James articulated an important insight. Authentic religious experienceleads to a change in one’s behavior, ideally transforming an individual into a more empathetic, ethical person. For Yogis and Jains, this religious trans-formation stems from and leads to the adoption and ongoing practice of five vows: nonviolence, truthfulness, not stealing, sexual restraint, and non-possession, applied according to each person’s place in life. Individuals inhistory have adapted, interpreted, and championed these vows for a variety of causes, most notably Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. By seeing how ethical behavior finds its roots in religious experience, and by exploring the various applications of these traditional and innovative pathways, one can moredeeply appreciate the optimism and pragmatism and high regard in which William James held the religious quest.

C. Key Chapple, Disciplines and Vows

Jewish Mysticism and Morality:Kabbalah and its Ontological Dualities

Jerome G

ellman

Introduction

In addressing Jewish mysticism and morality, I will be confining myself to themajor historical phenomenon of Jewish mysticism, the

kabbalah.

Having itsroots in earlier mysticism,

kabbalah

flourished in the 13

century in the Gerona school of mysticism and with the appearance of the

Book of the Zohar

, ascribedby tradition to the second century Rabbi Shimon Bar Yohai, but attributed by scholars to Moses de Leone, of Granada. It reached its most creative expressionin Safed, Palestine, in the 16

century, in the mysticism of Rabbi Isaac Luria and his pupils and associates. It then flowed into the Hasidic movement starting in the 18

century, and continues to be studied and cultivated down to our day.Henceforth, when I refer simply to “Jewish mysticism” I will mean that chief form of mysticism in Judaism.I will be using the term “mysticism,” to refer first to

unitive

experiences,monistic, theistic, nature mysticism, or whatever, involving a phenomenologicalde-emphasis, blurring, or eradication of multiplicity. For example, in monisticmysticism, all (or almost all) distinctions disappear; in theistic mysticism, someform of union blurs the separation of the mystic from God; and in naturemysticism, all becomes an essential, complex, unity. Mystical experience, in thisnarrow sense, excludes

numinous

experiences, which are non-unitive, and (mere)theurgic practices. Secondly, I mean “mysticism” to cover theologies (in a widesense, meant to include Buddhism) in which unitive experiences play (or:played) a central grounding role. Accordingly, my focus in what follows will beon the influence, or lack of it, of mystical experience upon the moral vision of

kabbalah

, as an instance of mystical theology.Unitive experience figures centrally in

kabbalah

in a number of ways, chiefly in the experience of the “unity of the worlds” and in the experience of the

ayin

,“Nothingness.” The

kabbalah

speaks of

almah d’pirudah

and

almah d’yihudah

,the “world of separation,” and the “world of unity.” These refer to conditions of the supernal divine emanation of ten

sefirot

, “aspects” of the Divine, and theirconstellations in layers of divine “worlds.” In the “world of separation,” thedivine world-elements exist in disjointed isolation from one another, with no

mutual support and interpenetration. In the “world of unity,” the divineelements are in a splendidly harmonious structure, in which each part contains within it elements of all other parts,

ad infinitum.

Human actions, morespecifically Jewish actions, theurgically determine whether the worlds arechaotic and disjointed, or structured and harmonious. In turn, the condition of the upper worlds determines whether our mundane world is itself chaotic andfragmented, or harmoniously ordered. In mystical prayer, especially, a mysticcan act to help bring about the world of unity as well as find himself in itexperientially. Above the experience of structural unity, lies the highest experience for the Jewish mystic, that of the

ayin

, or the “Nothingness,” the source of all the divineemanations. In the

ayin

, all opposites and distinctions vanish. Prof. Elior hasexplored the concept of

ayin

, with special application to the Hasidism of Habad. In general, as Daniel Matt describes it in his study of the concept of Nothingness in Jewish mysticism, ultimate theurgic success returns theemanated multiplicity back to its source in the ineffable

En Sof

, the Infinite,of which the

ayin

is an aspect, without parts and without multiplicity. In the words of Azriel of Gerona (13

century), in mystical prayer one “gathers themultiplicity” and ascends with it into the undifferentiated unity of the

ayin.

The ability to reach these unitive experiences does not depend uponpracticing an

unrestricted morality

, of love, compassion, respect, or whatever, asit does in some other traditions, such as Theravada Buddhism. (By an“unrestricted” morality I mean one directed equally toward all human beings.)Neither does an unrestricted morality issue from these unitive experiences, as it would in Christian mysticism. Instead, the morality of

kabbalah

is decidedly

restricted

, dominated as it is by two major ontological dualities standing in deeptension with the mystical themes: the duality of Jew and non-Jew and theduality of man and woman. These dualities, flowing from corresponding dualities in the

kabbalah

’s theosophic theology, have a profound effect on thebehavior of the mystic toward other human beings.The point here is not only that these dualities exist in the life of the mystic. With that we are familiar enough in other mystical traditions. The point is,rather, that these dualities are built-in to the mystical theology from the start,and shape the mystic’s “official” mystical moral outlook. It is only in 20

century Jewish mysticism that these dualities have begun to be sporadically overcome by isolated figures, in addition by popularizing movements incontemporary Jewry. So,

kabbalah

does not fit a familiar picture of othermysticisms.In what follows, I will describe the dualities of Jew and non-Jew, and maleand female in

kabbalah

, and explain how they are operative on the moral level.Then I will turn to examples in the 20

century where these dualities begin tobe transcended. With these tasks accomplished, I will turn to a discussion of

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

how we can best explain the deviation of Jewish mystical morality from that of other mystical traditions.Before beginning, two caveats are in order. The first:

Kabbalah

stretchesover many centuries as a cultural phenomenon among Jews who resided indifferent lands and in very different cultural climates. The ways mystics workedout the details of the dualities of which I speak differ from time to time andfrom place to place. We also witness some counter-indications and attempts tosoften the polarities. However, the latter are minor in both tone and impact. What I present will be the heavily predominant mainstream of Jewishmysticism, which has had the most impact on mystical circles and on Jewishhistory. The second: Against William Wainwright’s advice, I will be running together two kinds of questions: (1) An empirical question: Are therepsychological connections between mystical experience and unrestrictedmorality? (2) An epistemological question: do mystical experiences provide warrant for an unrestricted morality? I do so because in my mind the issuesintertwine in ways that I cannot go into here. At some future time, perhaps, I will try to untangle them.

Jew and Non-Jew

kabbalah

, a controlling ontological duality runs across the distinctionbetween unity and chaos in the mystical Godhead. This is the distinctionbetween the

sitrah d’kedushah

and the

sitrah ahra

, between the “Side of Holiness” and the “Other Side.” The “Other Side” is the realm of the demonic,the Satan, and the devils; in Lurianic

kabbalah

(16

century) the side of the“shells,” the discarded refuse of creation. The “Other Side” is a completenegative reality parallel to the Side of Holiness. The Other Side has its owndemonic structures of ten

sefirot

, aspects of the Other Side, and supernal worlds.The

Zohar

(13

century) states (3:41b): “Just as there are ten crowns of faithabove, so there are ten crowns of black-magic of impurity below.” And Haim Vital (1542–1620), the major transcriber of Lurianic mysticism writes: “Know that just as there are four supernal worlds of holiness… so too there are in therealm of the shells…and they are the opposite of holiness (

Etz Haim

, Section48, Chapter 3).” The only structural difference between the two realms is thaton the side of holiness, the potency of the holiness increases as one ascends thesupernal constellation, whereas on the side of Impurity, the potency of theimpurity increases as one descends the supernal constellation.The Other Side and the Side of Holiness are actively opposing forces. Whenthe Other Side’s worlds are chaotic and fragmented, weakened by Jewish gooddeeds, then the Divine ascends in its cohesion and all is well in our mundane world. When the Other Side is strengthened by Jewish misdeeds, the Divine

J. Gellman, Jewish Mysticism and Morality

chaos is increased. The world, our world, stands poised between these twocompeting realms, pulled in different directions, and the Jewish people aremandated to resist the pull of the impure

sefirot

, in dedication to strengthening the Divine inner harmony.Isaiah Tishby has noted that the

Zohar

avoids an ultimate ontologicaldualism, which would have been inconsistent with its theistic outlook, by recognizing the powers of impurity as “messengers” of the Divine. Lurianicmysticism, three centuries after the

Zohar

, avoids the threat of ultimate duality with its doctrine that divine sparks inhabit the impure “shells,” giving themtheir “life-force,” which they have none of independently. Hence, the duality isnot ultimate, as befits a theistic mysticism. Nonetheless, I refer to this as an“ontological dualism” because consisting of disparate metaphysical realms thatstand in profound opposition for all practical purposes.The ontological divide between the divine and the satanic, between the pureand the impure, impinges directly on the morality of Jewish mysticism whenthe same divide appears in our world in the guise of the divide between Jews andnon-Jews. The source of the Jewish soul is in the realm of the divine, whereasthe soul of the non-Jew is a part of the Other Side. Moshe Halamish, an Israeliresearcher, quotes from the mystical work

Shefa Tal

(by Shabbetai SheftelHorowitz, 1561–1619) that, “The Jewish nation is a part of the Godly above…. The nations are from the external powers, the powers of the shells.”Thus, non-Jews are ontologized into a separate, demonic reality from that of the Jews. The

Zohar

can thus deny the Image of God of non-Jews, saying that thenon-Jew is blessed with the “Image of the Other Side” instead (

Zohar

, 3:104b).Indeed, “The Holy One Blessed be He” cannot tolerate the non-Jews (

Zohar

,3:42b), where the “Holy One” is a name of the centrally located

sefirah

Tif’eret

in the divine emanations. The

shechinah

, the Indwelling Presence, doesnot rest on the non-Jews (

Tikunei Zohar,

69), and the non-Jews come from the“root of evil” (

Zohar

, 3:14a). On the other hand, the theme of mystical unity and harmony, that we saw earlier, applies to the People of Israel alone. They alone are “One body, one organism.” (Haim Vital,

Pri Etz Haim

, Section 12,Section on Repentant Prayer, Chapter 8.) The “nations of the world” float freefrom this mystical organic insight.This metaphysical view of the non-Jew contrasts sharply with the Medieval Jewish philosophical tradition. Maimonides, the greatest representative of thattradition, thought there was no ontological or racial difference between Jew andnon-Jew. What accounted for the “chosenness” of the Jewish people, forMaimonides, was the fact that the man who reached the highest level of prophecy, Moses, and who then prepared a Law for his people, happened to be a Jew. While Maimonides’ moral outlook would not pass the inspection of a contemporary committee responsible for political correctness, it does display

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

openness to non-Jews and Jewish culture that is far from the exclusionary ethnocentrism of the

kabbalah.

The immanent ontological difference between Jew and non-Jew has a profound affect upon Jewish mystical morality. In the Jerusalem Talmud(Tractate

Nedarim

, Chapter 9, Page 41c), we find the following dispute betweentwo Rabbis:

“You shall love your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18).” Rabbi Akiva said:“This is a basic principle of the Torah.” Ben Azai said: “ ‘This is the book of thegenerations of Adam. On the day that God created Adam, He created him in theimage of God (Genesis, 5:1).” This is a greater principle.“

Arthur Green, of Brandeis University, sees in this dispute a difference over thegrounds of Jewish morality. Rabbi Akiva grounds morality in love. Ben Azai ismore realistic. He grounds morality in the Image of God in all human beings,deserving of our respect whether we are capable of loving them or not. Jewish mystical morality undermines both grounds in the case of behaviortoward the non-Jew. In a study comparing

kabbalah

literature before and afterthe expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Moshe Halamish has shown that beforethe expulsion the verse in Leviticus: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” was rarely cited. After the expulsion,

kabbalists

cited this verse often, applying it,however, only to the love of Jews by Jews, and explicitly excluding non-Jewsfrom being recipients of Jewish love. The application of the biblical verse to Jews is unvaryingly grounded in the organic unity of the Jewish people. Non- Jews participate, metaphysically speaking, in an opposing unity, that of theOther Side. So, love does not get directed to them. If love is the ground of Jewish morality, as Rabbi Akiva maintains, then the ground is pulled out fromunder the non-Jew. On the other hand, if being in the Image of God grounds Jewish morality, as Ben Azai contends, we have seen that not only do Gentileslack the Image of God, they instantiate an opposing image.Thus does Jewish mystical morality make the two basic categories of traditional Jewish ethics, love of neighbor and the Image of God, inoperabletoward the

goy

, the non-Jew.Halamish has uncovered some counter-sources in Jewish mysticism. Forexample, the same Haim Vital who says that Gentile souls are from the shells of Impurity (

Etz Haim

, Section 49, Chapter 3) declares, “One must love allpeople, even non-Jews.” Nonetheless, as I noted earlier, the great preponderanceof kabbalistic mysticism is as I have reported.The ontologizing of the non-Jew into a separate, depraved category, and theconsequent negative attitudes, has obvious moral implications for the Jewishmystic. Especially potent examples include the following. We find in kabbalistic writings resistance to the very possibility of conversion of non-Jews to Judaism. A non-Jew becoming a Jew is a

metaphysical impossibility.

Indeed, as Isaiah

J. Gellman, Jewish Mysticism and Morality

Tishby has noted, the very notion of conversion subverts the task of battling theforces of evil. When kabbalists believe conversion is possible, they usually wishto deny equal spiritual status to the convert after the conversion. Others claimthat the only non-Jews who wish to convert are those who have covert ancestry among the Jews. In addition, concerning intermarriage between a Jew and non- Jew, this entails a cosmic act of strengthening the Other Side at the expense of the people of Israel. Finally, the social rejection of the non-Jew reaches its mostradical limits in the

Zohar’

s stricture not to approach physically close to a non- Jew, because the non-Jew is impure and imparts impurity to those who comeclose (

Zohar

, 1:220a).This restricted morality of Jewish mysticism lives in a symbiotic relationship with traditional Jewish law. “Jew” and “Gentile” are legal categories in tradi-tional Jewish law. Intermarriage is forbidden, there are laws about eating thefood of Gentiles (laws abrogated by Peter for a new law that knew no Greek andno Jew), and there are laws governing relations with non-Jewish courts. And soon. The

kabbalah

morality was certainly influenced by that system of law. At thesame time, it gave Jewish law a new grounding and a new rigidity, by ontologizing social categories into cosmic metaphysics. In turn, mysticalmorality impeded the modernization of Jewish law. What might otherwise havebeen regarded, in part at least, as social legislation given to possible change whensocial conditions shifted, became rooted in changeless cosmic principles thatdictated rather than only reflected social realities.It was not until the 20

century that Jewish mysticism showed some smallchange in moral direction. I will mention here two developments, one major,and the other still in the making. The first can be found in the extensive writings of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the first Chief Rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate, and the most celebrated Jewish mystic of the 20

century. While “Rav” Kook maintains a distinction between Jew andnon-Jew, and a central theurgic role for the Jewish people, a new moral attitude,for Jewish mysticism, appears prominently in his writings. He grounds his new approach in his mystical theology of unity, a theology in which the Other Sidedoes not make an appearance. For Rav Kook, the divine emanation encompassesall:

How beautiful is the mystical conception of the divine emanation as the source of all existence, all life, all beauty, all power, all justice, all good, all order, allprogress…. The divine emanation, by its being, engenders everything. It isunlimited in its freedom, there is no end to its unity, to its riches, to its perfection,to its splendor, and the influence of its potency and its diverse manifestations. Allthe oceans of song, all the diverse torrents of perception, all the force of life, all thelaughter, the joyous delights,—everything flows from it.

Explicitly, this includes all nations:

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The love for people must be alive in heart and soul, a love for all people and a lovefor all nations, expressing itself in a desire for their spiritual and materialadvancement.

Rav Kook’s love for all nations includes Amalek, the very personification of theImpure Side in

kabbalah.

He writes:

The degree of love in the soul of the righteous embraces all creatures, it excludesnothing, and no people or tongue. Even the wicked Amalek’s name is to be erasedby Biblical injunction only “from under the heavens” (Exodus, 17:14)…. He may be raised to the source of the good, which is above the heavens, and is then includedin the higher love. But one needs great strength and a lofty state of purity for thisexalted kind of unification.

For Rav Kook, though humankind may not be prepared for it as yet, love is toextend to animals, precluding our eating them or sacrificing them to God ineschatological times.The second, more recent, development, away from the ontologicalcategorization of the non-Jew and the accompanying moral implications, is inthe contemporary theology of Rabbi Arthur Green, the scholar of

kabbalah

Imentioned earlier. Green, without claiming mystical illumination, consciously fashions his theology on the emanationist-unitive understanding of Jewishmysticism:

The struggle of religious vision is always one of uplifting and transforming themundane, of making our own separate lives vessels into which the light of unity may flow.

This divine light is, now, all encompassing:

The divine light extends to all peoples, as it does to each individual soul.

As a result, every human being is created in God’s image:

We encounter the divine through relationship with another person. We attempt toseek out the One through images of a person, through encountering God as another“person.” Both of these are made possible for us by the Bible’s most remarkableassertion that the human being is created in God’s image. The person—every person—is an earthly replica or small repository of the fullness of divine energy….Humans somehow

look like

God, … the human form and the divine form, however we understand those phrases, have something in common. In particular, this seemsto mean that the human face—every human face—is a copy or reflection of the faceof God.

Green’s emphasis on “every person” and “every human face,” is meant todistance him from traditional Jewish mystical morality, while retaining itsunitive character. Later I will return to these new developments and to what they can tell us about the complex relation between Jewish mysticism and Jewishmorality.

J. Gellman, Jewish Mysticism and Morality

Men and Women

kabbalah,

the supernal complex of emanations has both a male and a femalecharacter. The female character is best represented by the

shechinah

, the

sefirah

in immediate relationship with our world. The

shechinah

is feminine, theconsort of the masculine

Tif’eret

, or “Beauty.” The second wave of Jewishfeminism saw the

shechinah

as a welcome feminine counter-balance to what wasperceived of as an androcentric traditional concept of God. Feminists composedprayers to the

shechinah

and devised rituals of

shechinah

worship. Unfortunately,as some other feminists have pointed out, these practices do not well representthe place of the feminine in kabbalistic literature. Indeed, the feminine isontologized subordinately to the masculine, with direct consequences for themoral status of women. Jewish mysticism ontologizes the normativity of the male, as it does thenormativity of the Jew. The ten

sefirot

are mapped onto the figure of a supernalman in the way that a constellation of stars is mapped on to a human figure,except that here the mapping has mystical meaning. While mappings differ, hereis a usual one:Crown—Top of HeadUnderstanding—Left Brain Wisdom—Right Brain Judgement—Left Arm Kindness—Right ArmBeauty—HeartMajesty—Left Leg Eternity—Right Leg Foundation—Phallus

Shechinah

– WomanIn some schemes, Majesty and Eternity are the two testicles instead of the legs,and in some, the

Shechinah

is none other than the corona of the penis, not quitea woman, but close. Within this male representation, there are male and femaleaspects. The male aspect resides in the right side of the anthropos, associated with grace and holiness; the left side is feminine, harsh, and judgmental, at the very edge of the demonic realm. The

shechinah

, as feminine, even when broughtto the center by the male side, still tilts to the left, as I have represented her. Thefemale side does not emanate in a direct line from the

En Sof

, the Infinite.Instead, it emanates from the right, male side, which issues in a direct line fromthe Infinite. Even after emanating from the male side, then, the female iscontained within, as but a side of, the anthropos male. This is certainly so if the

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

shechinah

is none other than the corona of the male sexual member, and there isno female

sefirah

independent of the male. However, even if the

shechinah

is a woman, more precisely the woman’s sexual organs, the

shechinah

functionsconstructively in the system only when attached to the male body of God.On her own, the

shechinah

is powerless, dominated by whoever manages tosubdue her. The

shechinah

is in constant danger of being captured by and turnedinto an instrument of the powers of impurity. The cosmic drama of female vulnerability and male domination reflects the patriarchal situation on theground, no doubt. What Jewish mysticism has added to the story is that humanmale-female relationships are a subtext to an ontologized cosmic drama proceeding within the life of the Godhead.In a study of the feminine in

kabbalah

, Elliot Wolfson has shown that in thisscheme there is no equality between the masculine and feminine. The theurgicaim of unifying the left side with the right side, aims to include the feminine within the masculine. When the female is autonomous, it falls into thedominion of the Other Side, the latter lurking just to the left of the DivineMan. When joined, “the female,” says Wolfson, “is absorbed in the male and thepolarity of male and female is abolished (Page 169).” This motif is bestexpressed in the following passage from the Zohar, quoted by Wolfson:

When the Holy One, blessed be He, created man, He created him perfect, as it says,“God made man straight (Ecclesiastes, 7:29). “Man”: male and female, and thefemale was contained in the male; thus is it written “straight” (

Zohar

, 3:18b).

The need to contain the feminine characterizes the kabbalistic ritual practice of “sweetening judgement,” judgement belonging to the female side. For example,prior to pouring the wine (whose redness embodies the left-side’s sternness andpotentially uncontrollable nature) into his ritual cup, a kabbalist will first pourinto his cup a bit of water, embodying the flowing of the right side’s grace, Thisaccomplished, the feminine “redness” will be made docile. While the Jewish woman’s depleted ontological status cannot be comparedto that of the Gentile there is an affinity between the two: the feminine is on theleft and if we go leftward still we met the Impure Powers. “The People of Israel,” (!) on the other hand, “ is from the right side (

Zohar

, 3:77a). Theconjunction, therefore, of Jewish women with non-Jewish men poses a particularly potent threat from the side of Impurity. It is no wonder that somekabbalists who believed in successive reincarnations for non-Jews, thought thelatter could eventually reincarnate into Jewish women, but not into Jewish men.To summarize, I could do no better than to quote Wolfson’s citing of Moshede Leon: “When one receives the holy covenant that is sealed and inscribed onhis flesh, then he is included in the category of a human being.” Just as with the division between Jew and non-Jew, the polarity of male andfemale is a central feature of traditional Jewish law, and certainly reflects the

J. Gellman, Jewish Mysticism and Morality

legal history of Judaism. On the other hand, however, the ontologizing of women into an inferior metaphysical category created new extreme stringency inlaws pertaining to women (For example, in

Zohar

, 1:126, 2:3, 3:127, and3:248). It also hardened the man-woman categories into eternal principles andcontributed to the resistance to a modernization in Jewish law in the direction of greater equality between the sexes. By forbidding women to study

kabbalah

, forexample, Jewish mysticism strongly reinforced and perpetuated the exclusion of women from the learning culture of Judaism. Again, Rabbi Arthur Green (but not Rav Kook) deontologizes gender, which traditional Jewish mysticism turned into metaphysical categories. WhenGreen departed from traditional Jewish mysticism concerning non-Jews, he didso in the name of the unitive character of that tradition. Here, however, thatunitive tradition includes the uniting of the male and female into the domain of the male, weakening the female in male domination. Here, then, we have notonly an erasure of the Other Side, but also a serious re-working of the unitivetheme itself in Jewish mysticism.To summarize the picture I have presented, while traditional Jewishmysticism strives for the experience of the

ayin

, the Nothing, into which “all”distinctions are absorbed, and knows of the unity of the worlds and of the

sefirot

, it does not apply these categories to non-Jews, who remain outside thescope of these conceptions. Furthermore, in seeking unity between the feminineand masculine in the Divine, Jewish mysticism subdues the female under thesubjugation of the male. The preoccupation is with controlling and preventing the feminine from allying with the Other Side. The subordination of women isthus frozen in metaphysical eternity.

Jewish Mystcism and Morality

Well. We certainly end up with a picture far from the image of the mystic whoknows only love, compassion, and respect for all human beings withoutrestriction. What then of the connection between founding mystical, that is,unitive experience, and unrestricted morality in the case of Jewish mysticism?There are a number of possible approaches to this question, each of which I willnow comment on.

Jewish Mysticism is not strongly informed by mystical illumination in the first place.

For me, it is an open question to what extent Jewish “mystical” theology articulates unitive mystical encounters and to what extent it reflects instead sheermetaphysical creativity, the elaboration of what was generated way back by someby mystical experience, or numinous, rather than mystical, experience.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Undoubtedly mystical experiences live early in its pedigree, and undoubtedly there were figures in this movement who enjoyed bona fide mysticalilluminations. On the other hand, there were intellectual borrowings fromneo-Platonism and Gnosticism, as well as from Jewish philosophy and rabbinicliterature with no grounding in mysticism. The Gnostic influence of the

Zohar

,for example, is especially marked, to the point of its vocabulary and phraseology.Besides Gnostic themes, Gershom Scholem found many key expressions in the

Zohar

used a great deal by Gnostics but not to be found in Jewish literature. Of course, borrowings may have proved useful precisely to express the content of Jewish mystical theology. However, as time goes by and the theosophical systembecomes more convoluted and intricate, one justly wonders whether develop-ments are any longer informed by original mystical illumination. A comparison could be made here to the Christian mystic, Jakob Boehme, who, it so happens, was influenced by

kabbalah.

Boehme professed that a directillumination was the source of his writing, which tells of complex systems of

Byss

and

Abyss

, sets of triadic forces, flashes, and intricate connections betweenthese and Lucifer. Since Boehme wrote only many years after his mysticalillumination in 1600, we are entitled to wonder how much of what he wrotereflected mystical content and how much borrowings and imaginativeelaboration.If we minimize the mystical impact on

kabbalah

, we could explain itsrestricted morality in terms of mystical illumination not “driving home” itsunitive content, and thus not possessing the moral impact it would haveotherwise.

Mystical experience does not ground unrestricted morality at all.

On this option, my problem doesn’t arise because there is no reason in the firstplace for thinking that unitive experiences will ground unrestricted morality. Wainwright expressed this view, perhaps in a more muted form. Various formsof mysticism that he considers, he claims, “support non-moral ideals, orreinforce moral ideals whose principle roots lie elsewhere.” On this conception,then, a Christian ethic of unrestricted love issues out of Christian mysticalexperience primarily because such an ethic belongs to the ethos of the mystic’senvironment in the first place. And Jewish mysticism expresses a restricted ethicbecause of the severe ethnic definition and patriarchal legal system of themystic’s religion in the first place and because of historical Gentile hostility tothe Jews.The explanation, on this alternative, for departures from restricted morality by Rav Kook, for example, lies in the fact that his moral sense participates, to a degree, in modern liberal attitudes. Mystical illumination is a disengaged wheelin the mechanisms shaping the mystic’s morality.

J. Gellman, Jewish Mysticism and Morality

The mystical ground for unrestricted morality can be reshaped by other experiences of the mystic.

On this option, unitive mystical experience does create a

prima facie

ground forunrestricted morality in Jewish mysticism, but that ground is undermined orcompromised by other experiences—numinous, especially—of, for example, a dualistic reality or of a demonic order. On this model, Jewish mysticism isgrounded on conflicting experiences, mystical and numinous, and consists of anattempt to work out the relationship between the competing illuminations andinsights. The explanation for Rav Kook’s innovative mystical morality regarding non-Jews then would be roughly something like this: He lacked personalexperience of a demonic order and so the impact of his unitive experiencesremained (partially) unchallenged with regard to non-Jews.

The mystical grounds for unrestricted morality can be reshaped by cultural norms.

On this option, unitive mystical experience does create a ground for unrestrictedmorality in Jewish mysticism, but that ground is undermined by the mystics’culture. When the mystic articulates his experience, he passes it through thefilter of his cultural setting. Jewish mystics lived under the historical impact of hostility from Gentiles, most famously under Christian rule, as in Gerona of the13

century. Mystical literature was intended for internal consumption only. It would have taken a “strong poet” to subvert or even ignore the standing ethos of fear of and anger at the Gentile populace among which the mystics lived. Onthis option, the shift we saw in the thought of Rav Kook would be a result of a shift to more favorable cultural conditions and the consequent weakening of thefiltering mechanism.

The unitive experience has limited scope in the first place.

On this option, when the Jewish mystic, such as Azriel of Gerona, talks about“gathering multiplicity” into the Godhead, in the first place this does notinclude

all

multiplicity. One sub-option is this: Although the Jewish mystic

talks

this way, in his discourse the non-Jew and women are essentially invisible. Weare quite familiar with the invisibility of the “Other” in other contexts as a strong cultural determinant. This sub-alternative insinuates the same into Jewishmystical practice. A second sub-option is this: Despite all of my talk about ontologizing thenon-Jew and women, the Jewish mystics think of the “nations of the world” aslacking substantive existence. Instead, they are a mere “outer clothing” of theDivine sparks within them, the covering deceptively suggesting substantiveexistence for the non-Jews. Therefore, when all worlds are united, the non-Jews

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

have no distinct reality with which to be united. The category of “non-Jew” isnot a real one, and so when all distinctions are dissolved, this one is not. The“ontologizing” of the non-Jew must thus be relativized to a level of practicalmystical discourse. In a somewhat similar way, the ontologizing of women gives way to the absorption of the female into the male, in what Elliot Wolfson calls,“making the female male.” So here we have an explanation of how a unitivetheology could cohabit with an exclusionary morality, provided we acknowledgethat morality engages with the practical discourse.Options (1) and (2) are inconsistent. Options (3), (4), and (5) assume the falsity of (2). Option (2) seems grossly counterintuitive to me. I find (1) to beattractive, but it may be too radical on my slim historical evidence. That leavesus with (3), (4), and (5), which form a consistent triad provided we do not readeach as providing the sole answer to our question. The explanation in (3) of how a change took place in Rav Kook’s writings lacks force on its own, unless we addthat whether a person has experience of a demonic realm will depend muchupon cultural influences and expectations. Which then means we will have tosupplement (3) with (4) and (5). (5)’s second sub-option, denying ultimatereality to the excluded ones is to be found in Lurianic mysticism’s view of thetheurgic removing of the inner sparks of the “ nations of the world,” at whichpoint they disappear from the face of the earth. Lacking any self-substance, they are no longer to be found anywhere.To conclude, I propose we locate the explanations for the restricted morality of Jewish mysticism in the

kabbalah

in alternatives (3)-(5), with a gaze over tooption (1) as well. A consequence of my discussion is this:

Either Jewish mysticism is quite different from that of all other mystical traditions,or Jewish mysticism shows the tenuous hold of mystical illumination on moral vision.

J. Gellman, Jewish Mysticism and Morality

Noble Character in Islam

Paul L. H

eck

The goal here is to consider whether the mystical point of view contributesanything to the ethical outlook of Islam. The mystical point of view, when itcomes to Islam, is decidedly God-centered, a theistic mysticism, as opposed to a nature- or drug-based mysticism (even if infrequent instances of these elementscan be found within the mystical heritage of Islam). Mystical insight is a form of religiosity that lies beyond what is considered obligatory for all Muslims, namely affirmation of the doctrines and adherence to the practices of Islam. It involvesseeing God for those in the first rank of mysticism, beholding the heavenly realm, and making such things the focal point of one’s earthly existence; or, if one cannot quite attain such a spiritual height, so as to see God at all times, a secondary rank of mysticism can be reached by realizing that God is alwaysaware of the state of one’s soul. Thus, building upon a canonical hadith to thiseffect, the mystical heritage of Islam, known as Sufism, has formalized twounderstandings of the mystical experience, both of which go beyond doctrineand practice: either seeing God always or realizing that one is always seen by God. Both notions speak of a measure of communion of the heart of thebeliever with the divine, above and beyond what the mind assents to and thebody performs as required by Islamic doctrine and law.It is nevertheless impossible to separate the mystical from the normativeaspects of Islam. Already in the Qur’an, there are multiple perspectives on God.He is depicted as having ascended His throne in heaven, positioned topromulgate His will—commands and prohibitions—and to dole out justice onthe final day. He is king, king of kings, but also merciful, most merciful, ready to pardon His subjects out of his bountiful magnanimity. Here, it is He who setsout the course for believers to follow, which in Islam is known as shari‘a, theMuslim way of life, which is often translated as the law of Islam, but includesmore than strictly legal material: directives on praying, fasting, ritualpurification of the body, pilgrimage, as well as norms for commerce andfinance, divorce and marriage, family inheritance, land ownership, conduct in war, hunting, lost and found articles, punishment for crime, and so on and soforth. A complex corpus of precedents with a system of jurisprudence thatallows for flexibility and adaptability, shari‘a represents justice for Muslims—both the rights of God to be worshipped and human rights to equitabletreatment and fair-dealing. In this juristic sense, shari‘a has sometimes beendeployed as a political slogan, apart from its content, by Muslims who have

sought justice from authoritarian and arbitrary rule. The vast storehouse of shari‘a, embodied in volumes of compendia that leading jurists have compiledover the centuries, is about everyone getting their due, both God and humans, whatever the case at hand might be.The Qur’an also has another view of the divine, speaking of the face of Godas omnipresent.

Wherever one turns, east or west, there is the face of God. It is,in fact, the sole reality, since the Qur’an says that all perishes save the face of God. It also signals a willingness to sacrifice, i.e. to give and forgive, and also toendure patiently for the face of God. Here, the Qur’an offers another ethical viewpoint, one that is not limited to following God’s decrees as embodied inshari‘a but that springs from the realization that the God of Islam is no tribaldeity or ancestral spirit, not the pride and possession of a particular group in a particular locale, but the Creator and Lord of all, unlimited and unbounded, theGod besides whom there is none other, in echo of biblical material, such as theBook of Isaiah, where the prophets of ancient Israel came to the realization thattheir God was not one of many, even if the best, but the only one. Theexpansiveness of this qur’anic outlook on God is the starting point for anexpansive ethical disposition, where one locates the face of God beyond tribalbounds, necessitating one to act always as if in the presence of God with all, thestranger no less than clan relation.The mystical point of view, then, even if formalized only later, cannot besaid to be an add-on to Islam. It is there from the beginning when the revelationof God was communicated to the Prophet Muhammad and conveyed by him toa seventh-century Arab-speaking society, which was largely tribal in structurebut also cognizant of the biblical heritage as well as the wider political context of the day as represented by the Byzantine and Sasanian (Persian) empires. This viewpoint, which begins and ends with the omnipresent face of God, inaddition to the creedal and legal norms of Islam, had the effect of expanding theethical heritage of Arabia, an ethical expansiveness that was eventually greatly developed within the heritage of Sufism, where it was combined with a neo-platonic view of existence in which this world, while not false, was only a reflection of a greater reality, a divine reality, in which all things shared; allexistence—human and non-human, male and female, animate and non-animate—was said to exist only insofar as it shared in true existence, which wasthe existence of God.

All things, then, could be said to reflect something of theface of God and should be treated accordingly, breaking down mental divisionsbetween friend and foe, believer and infidel, while also encouraging an ethical

1 See the entries on “Face of God” and “Attributes of God” in

Encyclopaedia of the Qur’an

,5 vols., ed. Jane Dammen-McAuliffe, Leiden: Brill, 2001–2005.2 For a basic overview of the ideas and history of Sufism, see Paul L. Heck, “Sufism— What Is It Exactly?”

Religion Compass

1 (2007): 148–164.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

disposition that made sense of sacrificing for the sake of others no less than forthe sake of the face of God. In echo of a canonical hadith where the ProphetMuhammad reports God saying that He was a hidden jewel and thus created theuniverse in order that He might be known, Sufism came to see that all reality—not only qur’anic verse—is a kind of divine revelation; all things representnames of God in their true reality.The multivalent nature of ethics in Islam is already present in the Muslimappreciation of the Prophet Muhammad. He was messenger of God, divinely commissioned to deliver the news of God and the Day of Judgment, when all justice would be perfected. He was also a lawgiver, a mediator of tribal conflict,military leader, and head of the nascent Muslim polity in Medina. His life in allits aspects is understood by Muslims to have been oriented to God. It was hiscustom to pass his nights in prayerful vigil (

tahajjad

) above and beyond the fivedaily prayers prescribed by shari‘a. He was a friend of God in the sense that Abraham, his prophetic precursor, had been. He is reported to have enjoyed anintimacy and communion with God, and Muslims often refer to him as “thebeloved of God” (

habib allah

). It is firmly believed that he not only acted with justice in all that he did but that he also exhibited a willingness to forego hisrights to revenge and retribution when offended or wronged. The classicexample of this is the conquest of Mecca, which happened peacefully and is inthat sense considered to have been the greatest of the Muslim conquests. TheProphet, who had been maligned and attacked by the tribal leaders of Mecca,now commanded a superior force with which he could have easily taken the city by force. Instead, he chose to forego revenge and retribution for the sake of peace with very generous terms for his adversaries. Was this simply politicalstratagem or was this evidence of a noble spiritual character: action for the faceof God, a willingness to sacrifice for the love of God, as encouraged by theQur’an (3:92), “You will not attain righteousness until you sacrifice what youlove.” A key hadith with wide circulation is one in which the Prophet is reportedto have said, in response to a question about the essence of Islam, “Do not beangry and paradise will be yours” (

la taghdab wa-laka l-janna

How are we tounderstand such an extraordinary statement? How is it possible not to be angry at times? It certainly bespeaks an ethics that goes beyond the justice of the law alone and that is at odds with normal expectations of give-and-take ethics. Oneexpects to get one’s due—respect of one’s property and regard for one’s honor—and is angered if one does not. Here, Muhammad calls people to refrain frombeing angry, which suggests a high degree of self-transcendence, a lack of self-regard of the kind that usually leads one, sometimes angrily, to defend one’s

3 It is included, for example, as number sixteen in the famous collection of forty hadith by the thirteenth-century scholar al-Nawawi.

P. L. Heck, Noble Character in Islam

property and honor, i.e. one’s material and social standing in this world. Here,then, is important evidence for an ethical attitude in Islam that requires a spiritual awareness of being in the presence of God, of cleaving to God, suchthat one has regard not for self but for God—later given the formal descriptionof “absorption in God” (

al-fana’ fi llah

) in the mystical heritage. Awareness of being in the presence of God makes it possible, even reasonable, not to be angry when one’s reputation is slighted, and by not seeking retribution, one helpsshort-circuit the cycle of revenge that perpetuates disharmony, as epitomized ina Sufi statement on noble character, “The mark of kindliness is putting a stop totrouble by putting up with it.” The point is that one becomes so entranced by the presence of God, one relinquishes the impulse to anger, realizing that it isnot the things of this world but the things of the next that constitute the finalmeasure of success for believers. One can therefore forego rights and interests forthe face of God as exclusive object of one’s mystical attention, which works toreduce the ego and its worldly attachment—and even self-attachment. Thisthinking is epitomized in various anecdotes found in the classical manuals of Sufism, which first appeared in the tenth and eleventh centuries.

For example,in a thirteenth-century manual, the statement is made, “Getting along with allfolk, children, neighbors, friends and all people entirely, constitutes the [noble]character of Sufism, for by enduring insult and injury, the essence of the soul ismade manifest.”

And in an eleventh-century manual, one finds, “Kindliness ispatiently responding to reprehensible behavior with kind behavior.”

Suchexhortations to selflessness should not be seen as an abdication of justice—shari‘a is still there, but rather as evidence for a logic within the ethical heritageof Islam that is predicated upon a mystical awareness of being in the presence of God and of the names of God inscribed upon creation entire. Very early in Islam, then, there was both an ordinary and extraordinary understanding of ethical action. There were shari‘a norms related to ritualactions (

‘ibadat

) and social interactions (

mu‘amalat

) that set out basic standardsof justice and right relations both 1) between humans and God and 2) betweenhumans themselves. And there was also character (

akhlaq

), more specifically noble character (

makarim al-akhlaq

), perfection of which, a canonical hadithreports, was the purpose of Muhammad’s being sent to the world, as a mercy forcreation (

rahma lil-‘alamin

) as affirmed by the Qur’an. This part of the ethicalheritage of Islam, noble character, is vast and has worked its way deeply into

4 For Sufi manuals and their biographical element, see J.A. Mojaddedi,

The Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The Tabaqat Genre from al-Sulami to Jami

, Richmond, Surrey:Curzon Press, 2001.5 Abu Hafs al-Suhrawardi,

Kitab ‘Awarif al-Ma‘arif

, Cairo: Maktabat al-Qahira, 1973, p.245.6 al-Qushayri,

al-Risalat al-Qushayriyya

, ed. N. al-Jarrah, Beirut: Dar al-Sadir, 2001, p.159.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Muslim society through anecdotes and folktales that emphasize that adherenceto the law alone without a formation in noble character can easily result inarrogance.

It is meant to bring about harmony in society above and beyond what justice might demand, and for the spiritual virtuosi of Islam, theennoblement of character depends on orientation to the face of God—theethical fruit being an attitude of kindliness (

ihsan

) to all,

as evidenced in a passage from one of the letters of Ibn ‘Arabi, a thirteenth-century mysticalphilosopher who remains as influential and controversial today as he was in hisown age:

Kindliness is obligatory… for the Prophet said, “Indeed I have been sent to perfectnoble character (

makarim al-akhlaq

)… and [for that purpose] God introducedhimself into companionship with humans…. So, you undertake noble characteronly through the companionship of God exclusively. Do what pleases God andavoid what displeases Him, whether towards Him or towards others, for conducttowards others is counted among the things that please God…. All Muslims andnon-Muslims are edified by those who are attentive to the presence of God, andGod has a claim on every Muslim in their conduct with all God’s creatures, withoutexception, from every class of angel, jinn, human, animal, plant, mineral, andinanimate creature, whether believer or not.

The intellectual architects of Sufism have made much of a threefoldappreciation of religiosity. The basic level is conformity to the ritual andmoral actions stipulated by shari‘a; this is

islam

, but it is problematic sinceaction without sincerity of belief or the conviction of the heart runs the risk of hypocrisy, throwing into question the integrity of the religion. The next levelincludes true belief, i.e. assent of the mind to the doctrines of the faith; this is

iman

, but is also problematic because it runs the risk of reducing religiosity to a scholastic endeavor, i.e. an intellectual affair, sowing the seeds of theologicalargumentation and thus skepticism about the religion’s teachings.

The highestlevel is reached when the revelation is introduced into the heart, illuminating one’s view of reality and animating both body and mind; this is called

ihsan

, andresults not only in spiritual serenity, a contented soul (

nafs mutma’inna

, Q 89:27), but also a deep sense of love for God. The teachings of the religion areno longer something to be grudgingly performed or scholastically debated, butnow become an affair of the heart and thus object of one’s passions not one’s

7 For examples of this, see Paul L. Heck, “Mysticism as Morality: The Case of Sufism,”

Journal of Religious Ethics

34 (2006), 2:253–286, esp. pp. 275–279.8 The link between formation of religious character and orientation to the face of God wasalso made in early Christianity. See Robert Louis Wilken,

The Spirit of Early ChristianThought: Seeking the Face of God,

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003,especially chapter 11.9 Ibn ‘Arabi,

al-Wasaya

, Damascus: Dar al-Iman, 1997, pp. 57–58.10 For this tendency in Islam, see Paul L. Heck, “The Crisis of Knowledge in Islam (I): TheCase of al-‘Amiri,”

Philosophy East and West

56,1 (2006): 106–135.

P. L. Heck, Noble Character in Islam

scruples or doubts. The face of God becomes sole object of one’s longing, in allthat one does, and so worship is no longer containable in shari‘a-prescribednorms but extends to all action. All that one does now results in divine favor of the kind expected from performing shari‘a duties, if undertaken with theconviction of heart that comes from being in communion with God, i.e. “theheart’s connection to God” (

wisal al-qalb bi-llah

). Something of this expansiveethics characterizes the Sufi-influenced Nur movement in Turkey, led by Fethullah Gülen, where great emphasis is placed on moral action (

aksyon

) as a form of worship; the Nur movement is an outstanding example of a Muslimgroup that has, for example, made dialogue the hallmark of its inter-religiousrelations, emphasizing relational harmony rather than legality as the norm for itsmembers’ interactions with others, both Muslims and non-Muslims. It ispossible to conclude that this emphasis is not simply an appropriate ploy in a globalizing moment but the fruit of an understanding of religiosity that aspiresto a relational orientation to the face of God as paradigm for all relations.

The idea of noble character (

makarim al-akhlaq

), even if greatly developed within the circles of Sufism, is so widespread, so deeply rooted in Muslimconsciousness, that it cannot be confined to Sufism. It is simply part of Islam,no less than shari‘a is. It is therefore important to note that the mysticaldimension of Islam cannot be separated from its shari‘a heritage, even if somenew-age movements do deploy Sufism in that sense today. Rather, spiritualawareness, mystical living, is the fruit of the law, i.e. perfection of the law:realization (

tahqiq

, as Sufism calls it) of the possibility that prophecy only speaks of but does not necessarily bring about, namely life in the presence of God. In that sense, mysticism does not add ethical content to that already announced in the prophetic message but allows for the possibility of carrying out, i.e. fulfilling, what the prophetic message—detailed as shari‘a—demands of believers. It is for this reason that Sufism talks of itself as a way (

tariqa

), whichbegins with shari‘a, but ends in truth, i.e. divine truth (

haqiqa

)—a sense of theomnipresence of divine reality as singular reality, a spiritual awareness inducedespecially by a vigilant recollection (

dhikr

)—both individually and collective-ly

—of the names of God. In this sense, Sufism, the mystical heritage of Islam,acts only to facilitate realization of religion, i.e. god-consciousness, which inturn constitutes the motivation for being ethical, noted in Sufi manuals by thecorrelated pair of terms, hope (

raja’

) and fear (

khawf

), which together signal a

11 For the outlook of this group, see the various articles in

The Muslim World

95, 3 (2005), which constitutes a special issue, “Islam in Contemporary Turkey: the Contributions of Fethullah Gülen,” ed. Zeki Saritoprak.12 As a partial counter to William James, who considered mysticism a decidedly privatematter of the individual experience, Sufism offers a paradigm for the collective mysticalexperience.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

state of being constantly aware of God, i.e. fear of His majesty and hope in Hismercy. In other words, the self alone has no motivation for being ethical; only with a measure of self-detachment, which in Islam is the fruit of realizing God, will one be ethical—for the sake of the face of God. The duties of religion asexemplified in the life of the Prophet, again, sent to perfect noble character, donot make sense if not undertaken for the sake of a relation.

Being religious, then, requires a certain level of sacrifice, sacrifice for God, which in Muslim literature is spoken of as patience (

sabr

), i.e. enduring for God,for what God asks, a disposition which can, in turn, be transferred to allrelations; sacrifice for others is a way to fortify our relation with them.

Certainly, patience can also be a military virtue, i.e. endurance in the heat of battle, and one finds it affirmed in that sense in early—and later—Muslimliterature, with the condition that the battle be undertaken for the sake of God,again, the idea of being patient, i.e. sacrificing, for the sake of God. The term,however, was used much more widely, being associated in general withperformance of shari‘a obligations. One was patient, i.e. sacrificed, for God, butfor this to make sense, an eschatological framework was necessary. What Sufismcame to elaborate in terms of mystical insight, then, first appeared not inmystical categories per se but rather in terms of receiving divine favor, ultimately in the hereafter—i.e. anticipation of the

eschaton

(although, it should be added,not its realization in the political realm as featured in the reflections of Eric Voegelin in his study of political religions).I would like to demonstrate this point by turning to a work of the tenthcentury by Ibn Abi al-Dunya and entitled, not surprisingly,

Marakim al- Akhlaq.

This work shows, interestingly, that the early Muslims did not think of ethics of the kind we have been discussing as something unique to Islam butthat they did believe that Islam had perfected it. In other words, the firstMuslims saw Islam as completion of the Arab ethical heritage, just as early

13 One might ask of the relation of mysticism—or spirituality—to religion. Do they necessarily go together? There is empirical evidence that those who do not orientthemselves to the face of God can be ethically upright, raising the possibility of thespirituality of atheists—the principles, deepest convictions, by which they lead their life,a spirituality that may not be grounded in God but still requires a critical—questioning—detachment from the world and its ways, a certain spirituality, even if a secular spirituality. Philosophical inquiry as a way of life (in the sense described by PierreHadot) can be no less spiritually enriching than religious devotion, and yet, spirituality isnever finally dissociable, never finally separable, from religion. Spirituality can beachieved without religion, but it is always religion that sets the model for spirituality, fora worldview that refuses to take this world as the final standard.14 For concrete illustration of this notion, see Kristine L Florczak, “The Lived Experience of Sacrificing Something Important,”

Nursing Science Quarterly

19, 2 (2006), 133–141.15 See James Bellamy, “The Makarim al-Akhlaq by Ibn Abi l-Dunya,”

Muslim World

53(1963), 106–119.

P. L. Heck, Noble Character in Islam

Christians thought of Christian ethics as something not that Christianity hadinvented but that built upon the ethical heritage of the classical world. There was good reason for the first Muslims to distinguish their values as religious, nottribal, even though recognizing them as part of the wider tribal milieu of theirday. The beginnings of Islam, even if embedded in the tribal context of seventh-century Arabia, were primarily urban, and the call to faith was accompanied by a call to leave tribal life, tribal kith and kin, for citied life, first in Medina, for a new way of relating with others based not on blood and alliances, i.e. the stuff of tribes, but faith and piety. The values of tribal Arabia—generosity, magnanim-ity, clemency, endurance and fortitude—were to be adopted by Islam but with a new orientation, to the face of God and not as a function of personal and tribalreputation, group pride and individual honor. Ethics was now to have a religiouspurpose, namely heavenly reward, informing relations with all peoples regardlessof affiliation. If Islam was to succeed as an ethical venture, it had to broaden thescope of ethics beyond the prevailing tribal assumptions of the day, and so withIslam a system of universal kindliness came into being, based on notions of neighborliness and friendship and driven by a longing for the face of God, i.e. a heavenly reward above and beyond strategies and calculations for maximizing tribal standing and personal reputation; in other words, the ability to take pridein oneself and one’s clan was no longer to be the mark of ethical life; that mark was now to be sacrifice for the sake of God.In short, a social system in which cohesion was based on a shared faithrather than blood ties and tribal alliance required that one’s relations with othersclosely correspond to one’s relations with God, who was no tribal deity, divinepossession of a single clan, but Creator and Lord of all, greatly expanding theethical horizon of the Arab culture of the day. The demand of God for exclusivedevotion apart from any partners meant that wherever one turned, there indeed was the face of God, combining—in a single religious formula—worship of theone God with ethical dispositions of the heart that were necessarily universal inscope, since God was now understood to be universal in scope. Rightfulrelations with others were to be protected by shari‘a, which encompassed boththe rights of God to worship and the rights of humans to justice, but mutualrelationship, epitomized in kindliness, formed the lynchpin in a sliding dynamicbetween Muslims’ encounter of the merciful God and their merciful encounterof others. Ibn Abi al-Dunya begins his work, which is a collection of reportsabout the Prophet and the first Muslims, with a prophetic saying that “a man’sgenerosity is his religion, his virility his intellect, and his stature his ethicalcharacter.” Another saying by Muhammad describes God as “generous andloving generosity, magnanimous and loving magnanimity.” What is clear is thatthe prophetic disclosure of God—besides whom there was no other—required a new criterion of action, where self-denial actually made sense in light of one’sfinal destiny in God, as a hadith puts it, “Strive for truthfulness—even when it

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

seems to lead to destruction [i.e. in this world], it brings salvation [in the next world]. Put aside lying—even when it seems to lead to salvation [in this world],it brings destruction [in the next world].”The fact that with Islam one’s standing in this world was no longer the finalmeasure of success gave a new grounding to the soul in its relation to the worldand the things of it, as noted by a statement attributed by Ibn Abi al-Dunya toan early Muslim, “The believer is not content to see his neighbor injured or a relation in need but is rich-hearted without possessing anything in this world.He is not misled in his religion or deceived. For him, this world is nocompensation for the next, nor miserliness for magnanimity.” Gradually yetperceptibly, the moral norms one expected from tribal relations were reorientedin light of faith towards other believers and potentially towards all, as capturedin a saying by Muhammad, “Whosoever believes in God and judgment day should honor his neighbor. No believer is full while his neighbor goes hungry.”The ethical disposition which the exclusive monotheism of Islam enabledand strengthened is thus a function of an interior freedom that looks beyondgain or loss in worldly terms, a notion epitomized in a prophetic saying reportedby Ibn Abi l-Dunya: “A believer will not attain purity of faith until he repairsrelations with those who shun him (lit. cut him off), gives to those who havedeprived him, excuses those who have wronged him, forgives those who haveinsulted him, and acts kindly to those who have harmed him.” Ibn Abi l-Dunya records the top-ten list of morals in Islam as given by ‘A’isha, beloved wife of theProphet and leading figure in the development of early Islam: “honest speech,sincere fortitude in obeying God, giving to the suppliant, repaying good deeds,strengthening family ties, keeping faith, acting honorably to neighbors, acting nobly to friends, extending hospitality to guests, and chief of all is modesty (

haya’

).” Modesty, which it is better to translate in this context as humility, is a function of standing before God and giving Him His due as Creator and Lordof all, a spiritual orientation that transforms the heart of the believer towardsothers. In another prophetic saying, lack of humility is equated with unbelief—

kufr.

Humility is described by Ibn Abi l-Dunya as a kind of forbearance andclemency, even chastity, i.e. modesty in one’s dealings with others as opposed toimmodesty and greed, traits which undermine relations in society, assummarized in another of Muhammad’s sayings, “Ask God for relief [i.e.from greed]… and so [be free] of discord, enmity, covetousness, and spite; beservants of God as brothers.”To illustrate by comparison, it is noteworthy that something akin to this wasat work in early Christianity, which not only offered a new perspective on anancient faith but also attempted to create a new kind of society based not onkinship ties but shared devotion to the face of God as revealed in the person of Jesus Christ. The sociologist of religion, Rodney Stark, makes a compelling casefor this idea in

The Rise of Early Christianity

, arguing that early Christianity

P. L. Heck, Noble Character in Islam

flourished largely for the new ethical vision it wrought in the morally troubledcities of the Mediterranean world then under Roman imperial sway. The focusof Christian ethics was mercy, commanded by God in this life and rewarded inthe next. As Stark notes, a Christian ethics of love and charity that went beyondfamily and tribe was a tremendously attractive and galvanizing force against thechaos and misery marking the urban life of the day. It brought consolation,trust, solidarity, mercy—all the result of a willingness to sacrifice for the face of God, to view as small and inconsequential the things of this world alongside thepromises of the next. The idea that God loves humanity demanded thatChristians love one another if they were to cooperate with divine favor, not only witnessing to the claims of the Gospels but also creating the conditions by which society might more effectively cohere and flourish at a time of ethicalambiguity and social deprivation, conditions that might otherwise encourageselfishness rather than selflessness, bitterness and vengefulness rather thankindliness.The new orientation that Islam brought to the ethics of seventh-century Arabia was greatly expanded, elaborated, and consolidated in subsequentcenturies. The great eleventh-century scholar of Andalusia, Ibn Hazm, wholived about a century after Ibn Abi al-Dunya, was one of many who brought a philosophical perspective to the question. The only thing of lasting value, heargued in a treatise on ethics (

akhlaq

), is God.

Therefore, the only thing worth working for is God. Everything else ends in sorrow, but the person who isoriented towards God (

al-tawajjuh lil-llah

) and works for the next life (

al-akhira

) is never the object of others’ envy and enmity. He is even gladdened by setbacks, obstacles in his way, trials and tribulations, because these too arecounted towards the heavenly goal he aspires to. The point for Ibn Hazm is self-transcendence as key to life in this world, as he says (p. 338), “Expend your

self

only for a cause that is higher than your

self

, and that can be nothing but God.”If you choose such a path, you will no longer pay attention to the speech of people, who delight in accusing and shaming one another, but only to thespeech of the Creator. In point of fact, he says, to be viewed as blameworthy ispreferable to people’s praise, which leads to pride and self-satisfaction, whilepatient endurance of blame and insults will be rewarded in heaven.Ibn Hazm goes on to discuss the human faculty of discernment, i.e. thecapacity for rational decision-making, which, he says, is the one thing thatdistinguishes humans from beasts and associates them with the angels. Religion,he says, commands us to avoid living according to our passions and instincts,and for this we must use our reason, the tool given to us to hold in check our

16 Ibn Hazm, “Risala fi Mudawat al-Nafs wa-Tahdhib al-Akhlaq wa-l-Zuhd fi l-Radha’il,” vol. 1, pp. 322–415, in

Rasa’il Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi

, ed. Ihsan Abbas, 4 vols., Beirut:al-Mu’assasa al-‘Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wa-l-Nashr, 1983.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

baser inclinations that come from the irascible and appetitive aspects of thehuman soul—i.e. emotions such as anger and physical cravings of the body.Human reason is thus integral to the ethical disposition that religioncommands, empowering believers to resist acting according to naturalinclinations. He sums this up anecdotally (p. 342), “Whosoever does bad tohis family and neighbors is the most ignoble of them. Whosoever responds inkind to their ill treatment is like them. And whosoever does not respond in kindto their ill treatment is the noblest of them, the best and most virtuous.” Of course, such a moral disposition is identified with the ethics of the Prophet (p.345), who, again, was sent for the purpose of perfecting noble character,

makarim al-akhlaq.

If you want to be virtuous, Ibn Hazm says, you should notaccompany those who seek prestige, material comfort, and pleasure, for viciousdogs do the same. If it were not for worldly ambitions, people would not seek tobring down one another (p. 372); ambition is the cause of every anxiety,avoidance of which all peoples and nations agree is the goal of life; and theopposite of anxiety is the emancipation of the soul (

nazahat al-nafs

), a virtuethat ennobles one with courage, generosity, justice, and understanding, i.e.understanding that there is no benefit to be gained in the corresponding vices—timidity, miserliness, and injustice (p. 371). A believer as far as Ibn Hazm isconcerned is not led by his irascible and appetitive faculties, but is discerning—not simply discerning but discerning in light of the prophetic revelation of God(p. 370), “Whosoever affirms the vision of God [i.e. in the next life] has anintense longing for it, is greatly inclined to it, and is not content with anything that falls even the slightest degree short of it, because it is his ambition.” WithIbn Hazm’s treatise on character, we have a striking example of the Muslimunderstanding of the link between mystical awareness and an extraordinary ethical outlook that can put up with evil.Islam’s understanding of the relation between mystical awareness and ethicalpossibility reached a climax in the heritage of Sufism, which has had aninestimable impact on Muslim life and which closely combines intimateassociation with and deep longing for the face of God with an ethics of enduring the evil of the world in preference for a kindliness to all; such an ethical stance,Sufism would claim, is possible only by the empowering disclosure of the face of God. This did not mean that Sufism embodied a theology of tribulation, as if this world and all it contains is of no value and our existence in it simply anendurance test until we reach the hereafter. For Sufism, the ethics of patience with the world came not from its definition as a passing illusion but from therecognition of existence entire as the face of God. Sufism advanced the claimthat all that exists can only exist if it shares in the existence of God, making creation the site of God’s self-disclosure no less than the prophetic messagecontained in the Qur’an. How could one ever spite others, seek revenge forsuffering they inflicted, if they in some measure reflected the face of God—i.e.

P. L. Heck, Noble Character in Islam

the names of God, actually countless in number, which formed the spiritualreality behind the world’s material appearance according to the intellectualarchitects of Sufism?

To be so oriented to God necessitated spiritual training,refinement of the soul, the end being detachment not only from worldly concerns but even from one’s self, for it is in self-attachment that one is keptfrom total orientation to God and through Him to others as partial reflection of His image.For Sufism, the merciful face of God formed the departure point for bothmystical and ethical existence. The cycle of existence, beginning with God’squr’anic self-introduction as merciful, ends with Muslim acknowledgement of God, acting to refine their soul in godliness, which, in turn, is to mark theirrelations with all things, especially humans, since they represent glimmers of theface of God made manifest and reflected in creation. It is for this reason that wecan say that it has been

makarim al-akhlaq

—not shari‘a—that gives Islam’sethics its universalistic dimension; it is not adherence to shari‘a, howeverimportant that is for Muslim life, that endows a Muslim’s character with a universal outlook of kindliness to all but rather intimate relation with theunbounded presence of God, with the face of God which, as the Qur’an says,one encounters wherever one turns. A high stage of spiritual development isassumed here, as suggested by the great mystical poet of the thirteenth century,Rumi, who declared that God has given the world saints as an example of Hismercy to all created beings, noting in particular the universal scope of theirmercy which is also His, i.e. God’s, mercy.

How could it be otherwise whenone realizes that all indeed belongs to God, as Abu Hafs al-Suhrawardi, yetanother mystical virtuoso of the thirteenth century, put it, “Whoever claimspossession of something, his altruistic outlook is not sound, since he considershis

self

more entitled to the thing by possessing it. However, [true] altruism isthe mark of those who see that all things belong to God.”

The spiritual vision of Sufism, in other words, allowed for a tremendoussense of detachment, an extraordinary level of interior freedom (

hurriyya

),because the face of God that constituted exclusive object of one’s longing wasuniversally accessible, as heralded by the Qur’an. It is here that Islam moved in a direction wherein the concept of enemy no longer existed, as illustrated by al-

17 This idea, “the oneness of existence” (

wahdat al-wujud

), is commonly associated with Ibn‘Arabi (d. 1240) but is already present in the thinking of al-Ghazali (d. 1111), e.g. in his

Mishkat al-Anwar

(“Niche of Lights”).18 “He [God] brought the saints onto the earth in order that He might make them a mercy to [all] created beings…. To the vulgar belongs [only] the particular mercy [i.e. limited];the universal mercy (

rahmat-e kull

) belongs to the hero [i.e. perfect saint].” Rumi,

The Mathnawi

, ed. and trans. R.A. Nicholson, London: Luzac, 1940, 3:481, translatededition, p. 101.19 Abu Hafs al-Suhrawardi, op. cit., p. 250.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Qushayri, eleventh-century author of a popular manual on Sufism thatcontinues to be widely read today, who says that spiritual realization occurs“when one finds no difference in eating with friend or infidel.”

It is not only a question of a universal morality, extendable to all, but also the recognition thatthe quest for revenge is an illusion, and al-Qushayri describes kindliness, i.e. theheight of noble character, as “patiently responding to reprehensible behavior with kindly behavior.”

He illustrates this with a story about a Muslim tailorand his Zoroastrian client who would pay his bills with counterfeit dirham:

The tailor would [always] take it. One day, when he had business away from hisshop, the Zoroastrian came and paid counterfeit dirham to his assistant, who wouldnot accept it, and so the Zoroastrian paid authentic dirham. When the tailorreturned, he asked, “Where is the shirt of the Zoroastrian?” When the assistantrelated what had happened, he said, “What evil you have done! He has been treating me like that for some time, and I’ve borne it patiently, casting his counterfeit money in a well, lest another be harmed by it.”

In other words, enmity, the desire for retribution, is an illusion that leads us toperpetuate the cycle of evil, but a spiritual disposition focused on the face of God creates the potential for one to absorb the world’s evil and refrain fromseeking revenge, thereby putting a check on at least one part of the motivationto hate one’s enemy and removing a portion of evil from the cycle of revenge.This is not to suggest that justice is not to be served, but rather to point to theMuslim logic of ethical sensibilities above and beyond justice. In another story,this one related by Abu Hafs al-Suhrawardi about his uncle, Abu l-Najib al-Suhrawardi, spiritual luminary of the twelfth century, it is related:

I was with our sheikh [Abu l-Najib, i.e. his uncle] on his journey to Damascus whenone of the villages sent food to him in the presence of Crusader captives who werein chains. The table was set and the captives were to wait until he finished, but hesaid to a servant, “Fetch the captives so that they might sit at the table and eat withthe brethren.” He brought them, seating them at the table in a single row. Thesheikh got up…, walked over to them, and sat with them as if one among them. Heate and they ate, and it was made manifest on his face the humility before God that was at work within him, the contrition and detachment from pride over them onaccount of his faith, knowledge, and action.

For Islam, then, the desire for revenge, the tendency to disdain others, especially one’s so-called enemies, cannot be overcome by human, i.e. natural, virtuesalone, but needs a faith-filled mind, infused by a constant awareness of God, assuggested by Rumi:

20 al-Qushayri, op. cit., p. 46.21 al-Qushayri, op. cit., p. 159.22 al-Qushayri, op. cit., p. 159.

P. L. Heck, Noble Character in Islam

Nature desires revenge on its adversary./ Mind is like an iron chain on the carnalsoul [i.e. ego]./ It comes preventing it, restraining it./ Mind is like a police-inspectorof good and bad./ The faith-filled mind (

‘aql-e imani

) is like a just police-inspector,/the guardian and magistrate of the city of the heart (

shahr-e del

To conclude: Since the mystical heritage of Islam, Sufism, has been an intrinsicpart of the religious outlook of Islam, it cannot be said to add any content tothe ethical norms of Islam. At the same time, it constitutes an ethical dimensionthat is not reducible to shari‘a norms. In that sense, mysticism in Islam acts in a way that goes beyond standards of justice to refinement of the soul (

tazkiyat al-nafs

) for the purpose of shaping a character that is noble not base, magnanimousnot miserly, free not enslaved. In this sense, then, Sufism has developed thequr’anic revelation of the face of God in a way that 1) permits one to bepreoccupied with God alone and so be able, when deemed right, to forego theself and its attachments, i.e. its rights and interests, for the sake of a larger ethicalgoal, namely interpersonal, communal, and even universal harmony; and 2)expands the ethical horizon such that it is keyed to the omnipresent face of God—and thus all creatures, regardless of one’s ethnic or even religiousaffiliation to them. The ethical essence of Sufism—universal kindliness—is nota new idea per se, but is the expansive agent within a Muslim framework of ethics that must by its nature originate in God—both shari‘a and noblecharacter. It is not therefore a function of stoic indifference, a rational mastery of the soul, but rather of a longing for life in the presence of God as revealed butnot necessarily brought about by the Qur’an’s disclosure of God. In that sense,the ethics of Islam is not simply about knowledge of the standards of shari‘a, buta desire for the face of God for the sake of which one can sacrifice the ego’snatural inclinations and thus willingly (rather than grudgingly) adhere to thestandards of shari‘a, which reach their fulfillment, according to Sufism, in noblecharacter, i.e. kindliness to all. Sufism thus shows that the ethics of Islam isabout noble character (

makarim al-akhlaq

) no less than shari‘a justice.

23 Rumi, op. cit., 4:721, translated edition, p. 382.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Contemplative Ethics: Intimacy,

Amor Mundi

andDignificaton in Teresa of Avila and Julian of Norwich*

Beverly J. L

anzetta

Accounts within the Christian mystical tradition of moral behavior in the livesof the great mystics are manifold, among them the suffering gentleness of Francis who tended to beggars, lepers, and the crippled; the speculativeincisiveness of Meister Eckhart who demarcated the importance of helping those in need from mystical piety; and the verdant voice of Catherine of Siena who shamed men and popes by speaking about the suffering of the masses. Yetmany academic studies on the relationship of mysticism and ethics repeat theoften-stated idea that mystics display an unfortunate tendency to antinomian-ism, amoral behavior, or ethical apathy.

The dissonance perceived to exist between mysticism and ethics is due inpart to the definitions of mysticism employed, and to its modern, academicappropriation. Scholars of mysticism have uncritically adopted the essentialist,universalist definitions first posed by William James and others, associating mysticism with highly subjective personal encounters, ecstatic states of consciousness, and transient, ineffable experiences of nonordinary reality, tothe neglect of the whole of the mystic’s life of faith. A number of recent studieshave critiqued this correlation of mysticism with extraordinary psychologicalstates, and the privatization of the spiritual that emerges from it, as a

* An edited version of this chapter has appeared in

Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spi-rituality

(Johns Hopkins University Press) Spring 2005, vol. 5, no. 1: 1–18. Reprinted with kind permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.1 For scholarship on the relationship and tension between mysticism and morality, see James R. Horne,

The Moral Mystic

(Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press,1983), especially chapter 1, “Mysticism and the Amoral Life;” Arthur Danto, “EthicalTheory and Mystical Experience: A Response to Professors Proudfoot and Wainwright,”

Journal of Religious Ethics

4 (Spring 1976), 37–46; idem.

Mysticism and Morality

(New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Wayne Proudfoot, “Mysticism, the Numinous and theMoral,”

Journal of Religious Ethics

4 (Spring 1976), 3–28; William Wainwright,

Mysticism: A Study of its Nature, Cognitive Value and Moral Implications

(Brighton,Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981); G. William Barnard and Jeffrey J. Kripal, eds.

Crossing Boundaries: Essays on the Ethical Status of Mysticism

(New York: Seven Bridges Press,2002).

philosophical construction that disregards or is blind to the overriding evidenceof ethical concern in the lives and thought of the masters of religious history.

Further, the field of contemporary Christian ethics focuses almostexclusively on the social dimension of moral conduct, and less on the mysticalconsciousness that may propel it; it is also based on an onto-theologicalassumption critiqued by many postmodernists, and on a post-enlightenmentpreoccupation with the individualized, autonomous self.

Yet, the intrinsic unity of the spiritual and moral life was central to the patristic and medieval periods,and was even retained to a large extent in the Christian West until the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, when moral theology developed as a separatediscipline distinct from dogmatic theology. The moral theology of this period“manifested not merely a process of developing theological specialization but a bifurcation in the inherent relationship of the moral and spiritual dimensions of Christian living.”

2 For studies on the academic appropriation of mysticism see, Steven T. Katz,

Mysticismand Philosophical Analysis

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Grace M. Jantzen,

Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism

(Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 1997); Louis Dupre, “

Unio Mystica:

The State and the Experience,” in

Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue

, Moshe Idel and BernardMcGinn, eds. (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1989), 3–23; BernardMcGinn,

The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century

(New York:Crossroad Publishing Company, 1992), “General Introduction,” xi–xx. A number of studies underscore the moral in mysticism, among them: Steven T. Katz, “Mysticism andEthics in Western Mystical Traditions,”

Religious Studies

28 (September 1992) 3: 407–423 and “Mysticism and Ethics in Eastern Mystical Traditions,”

Religious Studies

28(June 1992) 2: 253–267. Grace M. Jantzen: “Ethics and Mysticism: Friends or Foes?”

Rijksuniversiteit te Leiden Rijksuniversiteit te Utrecht Universiteit van Amsterdam

39(1985): 314–326; Dennis J. Billy, “Mysticism and Moral Theology,”

Studia Moralia

34(1996): 389–415; Howard Thurman, “Mysticism and Ethics,”

Journal of Religious Thought

27 (1970) 2: 23–30; Janet K. Ruffing, ed.,

Mysticism and Social Transformation

(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001).3 The voices of feminist, womanist,

mujerista

, and postmodern theologians have critiquedthe foundation of the Western ethical tradition. Among them are Grace Jantzen,

Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999); idem,

Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism

; Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz,

En La Lucha: A Hispanic Women’s Liberation Theology

(Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1993); Lois K. Daly,

Feminist Theological Ethics: A Reader

(Louisville: Westminster JohnKnox Press, 1994); Emilie M. Townes, ed.

A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering

(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Press, 1995); Wendy Farley,

Tragic Visionand Divine Compassion: A Contemporary Theodicy

(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990); John D. Caputo,

Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligationwith Constant Reference to Deconstruction

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).4 See Mark O’Keefe,

Becoming Good, Becoming Holy: On the Relationship of ChristianEthics and Spirituality

(New York: Paulist Press, 1995), 13.

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To disrupt these associations and shift attention away from the mystical-ethical debate, I intend to focus in this paper on contemplative ethics in thethought of Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. While in the history of Christian theology ethical thought often has been concerned with obligations,responsibilities, and acts, at the same time there exists another tradition withinChristian moral thought that arises out of the contemplative life of prayer.

Here, ethics comes from within, from the interior life of virtues in relationship with the world, yielding the fruits of responsibilities and deeds. It is from thismystical orientation that some of the greatest ethical precepts have been givenform, and it is from them that we find a specific kind of ethical consciousness—an ethics of perfection—associated with deification and the virtues of prayer,humility, asceticism, selflessness, and loving compassion. As one of the most enduring strands of Christian mysticism, the term“contemplation” emerges in the West from the distinction made in the Platonicschools between the “description of the soul’s return to God throughpurification (

askesis

) followed by contemplative vision (

theoria

).”

In contem-porary usage, contemplation often is associated with the life of prayer andmysticism with “an immediate consciousness of the presence of God,”

but inactual fact the two terms are used interchangeably in many Christian mysticaltexts, with the implication that all deeply spiritual persons are intrinsically mystic-contemplatives. Both terms refer to a quality of being associated with themature spiritual life, and not just to the heightened, but temporary, alteredstates of consciousness that are sometimes associated with mystical experience incontemporary thought.In Christian literature a distinction is made between active and passive,sometimes also termed acquired and infused, contemplation. Although thisdistinction of active and passive is applicable to all modes of spirituality, thepassive dimension is most consistently reserved for the higher stages of mysticism or contemplation. In Christian thought, the “active” life refers to allthat we do to facilitate the journey—verbal prayer, good works, study, andpractice of virtues. The “passive” reflects how God works in us, leading usthrough silence, receptivity, and openness to share in the intimacy of the divinelife. It is the absence of self-willed activity, referring to the consciousness of surrender, vulnerability, and love. Teresa of Avila describes it best when she writes that active consolations in prayer “have their beginning in our own

5 On the relationship of spirituality and morality consult, Dennis J. Billy and Donna LynnOrsuto, eds.

Spirituality and Morality: Integrating Prayer and Action

(New York: PaulistPress, 1996).6 Bernard McGinn,

The Foundations of Mysticism

, 24.7 Ibid. xix.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

human nature and end in God;” while the passive “begin in God and end inourselves.”

In the early monastic communities, ethical behavior was the naturaloutgrowth of the passive life; morality and spirituality were one. The primacy of contemplative silence in the life of the monk led to “charity and hospitality [which] were matters of top priority, and took precedence over fasting andpersonal ascetic routines.”

This emphasis on ‘being’ over ‘doing’ was one of degree, a shift in perspective that allowed the monks to move from a deepercenter than the one demanded by the world. It was movement into a certainquality of life, that Thomas Merton called the “third position of integrity,” andin which monastic communities followed a “lifelong commitment to thedisinterested pursuit of the good and a willingness to enter a dark night of struggle so that they—and their enemies—might be born again: purged of demeaning social stereotypes and liberated from self-aggrandizing illusions.”

Monastic Piety and the Ethics of Perfection

From the beginning there has existed within Christianity a tradition of contemplative ethics that emphasized the attainment of deification, and wasclosely associated with the nascent monastic communities. Born out of constantprayer and reflection on divinity, this ethic of perfection was founded on thepromise first established in Iranaeus of Lyons’ famous phrase, later repeated by St. Athanasius: “God became man so that man might become God.” (

De Incarnatione

54). Imitation and participation in Christ’s divinity was thefoundation of moral perfection, for it was only through the development of selflessness and ardor for God that one could become deified, divine-like. Whileprimarily focused on the inner life of prayer and virtue, the monks wereexhorted to practice perfection in order to mirror the divine in the world. The whole of the monastic

charism

was to participate in Christ’s life to the extentthat one became a living example of God’s presence in human affairs. The questfor inner perfection was for the sake of outer

theosis

, love for the world and anethical concern for the spiritual integrity of others.

8 Teresa of Avila,

The Interior Castle

, 4.1.4 and 4.2.4. All citations from Teresa of Avila aretaken from

The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila

, 3 Volumes, Kieran Kavanaugh andOtilio Rodriquez, trans. (Washington, DC. Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1987).9 Thomas Merton,

The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the FourthCentury

(New York: New Directions, 1970), 16.10 Robert Inchausti,

Thomas Merton’s American Prophecy

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 92–93.11 See John Meyendorff, “Theosis in the Eastern Christian Tradition,” in WorldSpirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, vol. III.

Christian

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Thus, a contemplative ethic was the result of a deep personal confrontation with God, and recognition that the monk was called to be a living representativeof divine love. This ethic of perfection compelled the mystic monk toparticipate in and imitate the qualities of being that were revealed in the life of Jesus. The path to deification was through the development of virtues; foremostamong these were humility, passionlessness, and love. The mystical “method”involved prayer, silence, solitude, compunction, direction, surrender, andreconciliation. The inner way was for the sake of a higher

intentio:

to be living representatives of Christ’s integration of divinity and humanity. The master wasthe one all could look to for guidance on conduct born out of true sanctity. While this ethic of perfection did not address explicit social concerns—a unique development of modern culture—it was nonetheless directed towardsimilar obligations and goals. It was an ethical code of conduct that marked thelife of the monk as surely as moral strictures guide social contracts today. Aspioneers in the contemplative desert, the monks were to bring souls to God, andto have respect for all seekers because like Evagrius they understood that “‘It is a part of justice that you should pray not only for your own purification but alsofor that of every man. In doing this you will imitate the practice of the angels.”

For this reason Evagrius taught that progress in pure prayer should lead themonk to progress in love for all humanity: “Happy is the monk who views the welfare and progress of all men with as much joy as if it were his own… . and who considers all men as god—after God.”

Ethical perfection developed an ascetical strand, in which the techniques of prayer were employed as a purgative process in order to deconstruct the conceptof self, and to effect the reversal of social and spiritual oppression based onconventional notions of the real. Far from establishing the spiritual status quo,the heights of purgative contemplation were radically deconstructive to theperson, leading through dark nights, renunciation of ego desires and religiousnorms, and confrontation with the selfishness, greed, fear, despair and worthlessness that grip the soul. This deconstructive function was directly associated with the cross and the reversal of the sensible and ordinary, in orderto reveal the tragedy and exaltation of transcendence. Meditation on Christ’slife, death, and resurrection led the monks to reflect on selflessness and self-

Spirituality: Post-Reformation and Modern

, Louis Dupre and Don E. Saliers, eds. (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), 470–476. For a study on the relationshipof social ethics and Eastern Orthodoxy see, Vigen Guroian, “Notes Toward an EasternOrthodox Ethic,”

Journal of Religious Ethics

9 (2001) 2: 228–244. For an extendeddiscussion of

theosis

and moral thought consult, Mark O’Keefe,

Becoming Good,Becoming Holy

, 59–72.12 Evagrius Ponticus,

The Praktikos, Chapters on Prayer

, trans. John Eudes Bamberger(Spencer, MA: Cistercian Publications, 1970),

Chapters on Prayer

39, 61.13 Ibid.

Chapters on Prayer

122–123, 75.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

sacrifice as primary foundations for ethical behavior. The close relationshipbetween prayer and the moral life presupposed that any growth in prayer andholiness required a moral conversion, as is evident in the words of thenineteenth century monk Theophane the Recluse:

Prayer is the test of everything; prayer is also the source of everything; prayer is thedriving force of everything; prayer is also the director of everything. If prayer isright, everything is right. For prayer will not allow anything to go wrong.

It also supported a unitive, contemplative intimacy with God, a direct infusionof divine love, in which the monk had attained such an integral orientationtoward divinity that any actions that were contrary to perfection became a virtual impossibility. It is at this point that subject-object distinctions disappearand the mystic, speaking out of oneness itself, lays claim to having transcendedmoral dialectics. Yet, the apparent sublation of the moral life in passivecontemplation is a temporary suspension of constructed discourse for the sake of a higher, and more intense flowering of spiritual gifts. True contemplationalways overflows into creation—it becomes a creative act—as the monk participates in and lives out the fundamental dynamism toward the good thatconstitutes the inner Trinitarian relations. Both experiential and experimental,

theosis

honed and refined a contemplative ethic in which the primary motive was the surrendered, selfless-self given over to God. While the contemplative foundation of ethics in the West deserves a study of its own, I intend to focus in this paper on the specific contributions of twomedieval women masters, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila. We have intheir journeys a rare insight into the phenomenology of moral-mysticalconsciousness; that is, how ethical response emerges directly out of contem-plative experience. Specifically, it is possible to trace how their mysticalexperiences lead to recognition of the interconnectedness of all life and then tothe development of specific social concerns for others. Teresa explicitly addresseshow social reform is the direct response of the highest stages of infusedcontemplation in a commentary on the Mary-Martha story. “Martha andMary,” she writes in her

Meditation on the Song of Songs

, “never fail to work almost together when the soul is in this state [mystical marriage]. For in theactive—and seemingly exterior—work the soul is working interiorly. And whenthe active works rise from this interior root, they become lovely and very fragrant flowers.”

From the offspring of the active and contemplative lives,“heroic deeds will be born” and did so in Teresa’s religious and social reforms.

14 Cited in Billy,

Spirituality and Morality

, 75.15

Meditations on the Song of Songs

, 7.3.16 See Carole Slade, “Teresa of Avila as a Social Reformer,” in

Mysticism and Social Transformation

, 94–95.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Using the interpretive framework outlined above—that contemplative ethicsemerges out of mystical states of consciousness, among them prayer, develop-ment of virtues, and silence; and that its intention is to transform or deconstructtraditional views of human behavior in order to bring the divine vision into thehuman sphere—I focus on how the suffering face of Jesus-Sophia calls these women to empowerment and dignity, freeing them to challenge existing socialmores and develop their own ethical foundations.

Contemplation on the Suffering Face in Julian and Teresa

Although separated historically by almost two centuries, the spiritual lives andtheology of Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila are remarkably resonant witheach other, and with ethical concerns of contemporary feminists. Ascartographers of the soul, they explored the contemplative process that took them from fragmentation, self-denial, and inequality to the formation of ethicalprinciples based on intimacy, relationality, and dignity. As marginalized femalesin predominately male-dominated cultures, it was through their contemplativeexperiences and prayerful dialogues with God that they worked out theirpersonal wounding and social concerns. In their struggles toward spiritualequality they mapped out the territory by which mysticism becomes the site of ethical reflection and responsibility. Julian and Teresa’s writings reject a static moral order in favor of a relationalethics, which derives its authority from a primary encounter with the suffering face of Jesus. In their experience of the visionary Jesus, they would findresonance with Emmanuel Levinas on the importance of the face, and would dodoubt agree that “a face imposes itself upon me without my being able to bedeaf to it or to forget it, that is, without my being able to suspend my responsibility for its distress.”

It is always in relationship to the wounded faceof the Other that they are pierced to the core of their being in solidarity for thesuffering others of our world. In Julian and Teresa this intimate and intensely relational love of God forms the ground of their ethical behavior, establishing them as subjects in their own right.In order to situate their ethical responses, it is instructive to view how theiridentification with the suffering face leads them beyond their own spiritualoppression as women to identification with the suffering of humanity, their“fellow Christians,” and all creation. In the writings of Julian and Teresa there isa felt difference in the twenty years between their early expressions of worthlessness, inferiority, and debasement as women and their later, more

Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings

, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley,and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), 54.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

mature, writings that boldly affirm women’s dignity and spiritual authority.

Each of them struggled with their role as women, Julian in a more subtlemanner, concealed within the textual differences between her Short and Long texts. It is noteworthy that references to the motherhood of God are completely absent in the Short Text, and are developed over the many years that Julianponders Jesus’ message of love. What Julian accomplishes in a reasoned theological reflection from heranchor hold, Teresa experiences in a much more public and fiery fashion,through an anguishing twenty years of rejection, ridicule, and self-doubt. In a period spanning the middle of her adult life, Teresa struggles with issuesinvolving her status as a woman and her achievement of her own style of contemplative prayer, with the ridicule and suspicions she aroused in those whofelt her experiences were “from the devil.” Yet, mystically, they each arrive at a theology of integration and affirmation based on profound conversionexperiences of personal and Divine suffering, and develop distinct contempla-tive vocabularies to describe the process by which a person achieves and fully accepts oneself as God’s beloved. This personal realization of divine self-acceptance is the foundation of their ethical concerns and of the battle thatTeresa eventually wages to dignify the rights of women, girls,

conversos

, andothers.

Julian’s story is well known, how in her thirtieth and one half year sheprayed for a vision of Christ’s passion, a bodily illness, and three spiritual wounds of contrition, compassion, and longing with the will of God.

Herintention in these prayers was not for personal gain, but to experience Christ’slove as her own and to suffer His sufferings for the world. Julian’s entiretheological corpus is based around her initial visionary experience in which shecontemplates the textuality of Jesus’thirsting face and crucified body. Soon afterher vision she composes the first commentary, or Short Text, of her

Showings

, which she revises some twenty years later, after further thought and reflection,

18 See Beverly Lanzetta, “The Soul of Woman and the Dark Night of the Feminine” paperpresented at AAR Western Region (WESCOR), UC Davis, March 23, 2003; idem,“Julian and Teresa as Cartographers of the Soul: A Contemplative FeministHermeneutic,” paper presented at AAR Annual Meeting, Atlanta Georgia, November25, 2003; Constance FitzGerald, “A Discipleship of Equals: Voices from Traditions—Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross,” in

A Discipleship of Equals: Towards a ChristianFeminist Spirituality

, edited by Francis A. Eigo (Villanova, PA: Villanova University Press, 1988), 63–97.19 Throughout her works, Teresa makes reference to the dignity of women, social injustice,and ecclesial violence. But it is in

The Book of Her Foundations

that her most consistentanalysis of social reform can be found.20 Julian of Norwich,

Showings

, Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, eds. (New York:Paulist Press, 1978), Long Text (hereafter LT) 2, 177–179. All subsequent citationsfrom Julian are from this translation.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

into her Long Text. In this vision of Christ crucified, Julian identifies with the wounds of the savior and focuses on the longing God has for our salvation andbliss, a suffering longing shown in his dying love. As “the foundation of yourbeseeching,”

Christ is the matrix within which the human heart seeksconsolation of sin and wounding, leading her to develop an integrative theology based on her understanding of the centrality of love in Jesus’ message.Far from being a desire for personal spiritual gain, Julian sought identity with Jesus’ self-giving love, so that she also could experience more directly thesuffering of humanity. It is in the light of the suffering face of Christ that thetrue meaning and value of other things and actions can be correctly assessed.Through this intimacy of divine-human suffering (“for I wished that his painsmight be my pains”), Julian recognized that all other interpretations must rest“with compassion which would lead to longing for God.”

“Julian was awarethat identification with Christ must include identification with those for whomhe suffered,” writes Grace Jantzen, “and hence with their suffering; her prayerfor illness represented a willingness to share the pains of the dying in such a way that her understanding and compassion for them would increase and she wouldbe purged of any self-centredness in her responses.”

Teresa, in her thirty-ninth year, also discovers the mystical link between herpersonal shortcomings and the conditions of the world through her encounter with the suffering face of Jesus. In 1554, during the season of Lent, Teresa istransported by a statue of the “wounded Christ” to identify with his pathos forhumanity. Struggling with her attraction to gossip, honor, position, money, andtrivial concerns, the vision of the wounded Christ incites profound compunc-tion in Teresa, who experiences how her sins increase God’s wounds, and “how poorly,” she writes, “I thanked Him for those wounds that, it seems to me, my heart broke.”

This felt pain for what he suffered on our behalf impacts on hersense of responsibility to her sisters and spiritual friends. This conversionexperience is pivotal to Teresa’s future ethical stance, because it is through heridentification with Christ’s agonized face and wounded body that she ignites themoral fiber necessary to change her life around. Taking Christ’s wounds into herheart, Teresa is no longer free to act of her own self-will, but must evaluate hersubsequent behavior, response to moral issues, and responsibility for her growthin virtue and perfection against the horizon of Divine humility.The transformation of individual consciousness in their witness of thesuffering face expands out from a personal, salvation ethic to include a wider

21 LT, 86, 342.22 LT, 39, 180.23 Grace Jantzen,

Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian

(New York: Paulist Press, 2000),60.24

The Book of Her Life

, 9.1, 101.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

social, contemplative ethic. The foundation of this ethic of perfection is prayer,specifically contemplative or, to use Teresa’s language, mental prayer. For both Julian and Teresa prayer is the vessel or enclosure within which God’s longing for our redemption takes root and grows. Perfection and intimacy with God areboth source and fruit of the virtues, the former leading to the attainment of humility, compassion, and detachment of soul, while the latter overflows into anethical concern for the well being of their fellow Christians, and especially, forTeresa, to the sisters in her charge. Inner

theosis

mirrors and strives to plant theseeds of justice and love in all relations.Christ’s suffering compels in them a desire to share in the world’s sufferings,to bear for him and for others in an outpouring of solidarity with those who aremarginalized, ridiculed, and rejected: “I desire to suffer, Lord, since Yousuffered,” Teresa writes. “Let your will be done in me in every way, and may itnot please your majesty that something as precious as your love be given toanyone who serves you only for the sake of consolations.”

This contemplationon the suffering face takes on the marks of an inner moral compass by which Julian and Teresa evaluate their actions, and the world’s response, in light of Jesus’ loving passion.In their confrontation with the vulnerability of Jesus’ face, body, and wounds, their hearts are torn and whatever traces of self-centeredness remain areconsumed by the fiery flame of sorrow for human arrogance and sin. Yet, thismystical emptiness of self initiates an unreserved responsibility in which they reclaim their dignity as women, and articulate a new feminine

way

of liberationfor them and others. Julian, cloistered anchoress, and Teresa, foundress of contemplative communities, each finds in Jesus’ suffering face a mirror of their world. Through it they developed a distinctive contemplative ethic, born out of years of reflection and prayer, that will be developed according to three sub-themes: the ethics of intimacy,

amor mundi

, and dignification.

Ethic of Intimacy

And the more our deeds show that these are not merely polite words, all the more does the Lord bring us to Himself … Not content with having made the soul one with Himself,He begins to find His delight in it, reveal His secrets, and rejoice that it knows what it has gained… And He begins to commune with the soul in so intimate a friendship that He not only gives is back its own will but gives it His.

In following the path of self-renunciation as it leads to divine longing, the roleof intimacy becomes a central metaphor in the writings of both Julian and

25 Ibid. 11.12, 116.26

The Way of Perfection

, 32.12, 164.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Teresa. Their identification with Jesus’suffering leads them from mystical unionto a deeper, ontological intimacy between the depth of their souls and God. Thecommunion between God and the soul is “so intimate a friendship” thateverything is shared equally and the soul experiences not only its own will, butGod’s will. For Julian and Teresa, mystical intimacy involves identification withGod’s longing and pathos for humanity, and a bearing of the two-fold wounding of Christ’s passion. The soul experiences the afflictions of its mostreceptive nature, both in terms of the negative wounding sustained from bearing the sin and violence of the world, and the positive touching of Divine Wisdom which opens it to deeper reserves of communion and oneness. Teresa contendsthese sufferings are felt “in the very deep and intimate part of the soul,”

andmystically repeat the wounds borne by Jesus. Yet, she makes a radical departurefrom traditional theology when she states that his sufferings while alive weremuch greater than what he experienced in his passion, because “all things werepresent to Him and He was always witnessing the serious offenses committedagainst His Father.”

For those who are intimate with God’s presence in the world, human sin strikes into the very core where God and the soul are one. Shereflects on her own awareness of the suffering of a soul that is intimate with Godand how difficult it is “to see the many offenses committed so continually against His Majesty….that I believe that only one day of that pain would havebeen sufficient to end many lives;”

Yet, the intense suffering over the world’s afflictions is connected to theimmense exaltation of love God offers to the soul. The inner soul wounding andouter worldly offense exist in reciprocal relationship to the overflowing lovebetween God and the soul. The depth of the soul’s ability to bear God’s love forthe world exists in proportion to the intensity of love’s wounding of the soul. Inthe highest reaches of mystic contemplation, Julian and Teresa experience how Jesus “begins to commune with the soul in so intimate a friendship that He notonly gives it back its own will but gives it His.”

The communion that takesplace between God and the soul in its center teaches of the closeness God shares with all things and the manner in which they must bear for God the wounding and happiness of the world.The movement between suffering and exaltation follows the logic of lover-beloved, in which the “passion of Christ offers a principle for understanding what love really is; it is the standard by which love itself must be measured.”

The intimacy achieved in mystic contemplation impresses on these women

The Interior Castle

, 6.11.2.28 Ibid. 5.2.14.29 Ibid.30

Way of Perfection

, 32.12.31 Jantzen,

Julian

, 92.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

masters how the soul in its essence is always one with God, despite its errors,omissions, and sins. So powerful was this understanding of the undefiled lovebetween the soul and God, that it is not excessive to state that this equality of intimacy became the founding impetus of their lives and theologies.In various ways, Julian and Teresa address how the essential self is alwaysone with God. Using images of fortified dwellings (Julian, citadel; Teresa,crystalline castle) to describe the soul, each distinguishes between the inner andouter soul. The inner soul remains pure and holy, turned toward communion with God, while the outer soul, turned toward the world, is susceptible tohuman desires, attachments, and sins. Julian names this distinction betweeninner and outer soul with reference to the terms

substance

and

sensuality.

Substance is our essence, our pure nature made for God’s love; sensuality is thesoul’s response to impulses and attractions that lead the person astray. It is not,for Julian, representative of a dualism between body and soul. Since the humanperson is a reflection of divine wholeness, the integration of sensuality andsubstance is the spiritual way to freedom, a way that requires a mending of thefracture in consciousness of Julian’s “even Christians” who are torn between sinand essence.Teresa also conceptualizes the soul as having an outer aspect that turnstoward the world and is susceptible to its sins, and an inner pure and undefiledcore that is turned toward God. In

The Interior Castle

, Teresa distinguishes thethree outer

moradas

(dwellings) where a person confronts worldly limitation,suffering, and desire from the four interior rooms infused with supernaturallove. Prayer allows entrance into the castle, and is the surest method by whichthe soul moves from oppression and fragmentation to freedom and wholeness. As the soul advances in grace, it moves from occasional touches of divine unionto betrothal in which the soul’s “union with the Lord passes quickly, … [and] inthe end the two can be separated and each remains in itself.”

At the center of the castle, however, Jesus and the soul are united in “spiritual marriage” in a union “that is like what we have when rain falls from the sky into a river orfount; all is water, for the rain that fell from heaven cannot be divided orseparated from the water of the river… . The soul always remains with its Godin that center.”

Prayer is the primary mode of communion between Jesus and the soul, but a specific type of nondual, infused prayer—Teresa’s prayer of quiet, union,betrothal, and marriage; the prayer of mothering and one-ing of Julian. This isnot the prayer of subject and object, of Lord and damsel, but the fiery passionof lovers who share in the fullness of each other’s joys and sorrows. Through the

32 LT 57–59, 290–297.33

Interior Castle

, 7.2.4.34 Ibid.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

wounds and suffering of Jesus, Julian and Teresa mystically re-enact the event of Christ’s oneness with creation. Oneness, interconnectedness, and integration areintrinsic in all intimate relations. Whether from the shelter of Julian’s anchorhold, or in the bustle of the Monastery of the Incarnation where Teresa served asprioress, intimacy was more than a transient and private mystical encounter orimaginative vision, it was an essential quality of being that demanded an equalethical response. Reality was no longer viewed from the perspective of theindividualistic self, but was grasped, and borne, from intimacy itself. As Julian and Teresa mature in their spiritual lives—and assert theirauthority—they speak more directly to the responsibility, or ethic, intimacy brings and the need to evaluate the problem of sin from the perspective of Jesus’love for the world. In an especially important vision of the servant and the lord, Julian works out an urgent paradox that occupied her thoughts: how was she toreconcile the ordinary teaching of “Holy Church [in which] blame for our sinscontinually hangs upon us” with her spiritual understanding that “our Lord Godshow[s] no more blame to us than if we were as pure and as holy as the angels inheaven.”

In the vision, the lord sits in rest and peace, while the servant standsbefore him ready to do his will. The lord sends the servant to a certain place, butthe servant not only goes, but “dashes off and runs at great speed” and soon“falls into a dell and is greatly injured.”

The fall causes the servant great distressbecause in his pain he is unable to turn his face or seek consolation from his lord who is very near him. Julian conceives the vision in Trinitarian terms; the servant is Jesus and Adam (“that is to say all men,)” the lord is “God the Father,” and “the Holy Spirit is the equal love which is in them both.”

She thus interprets thisteaching to signify how God looks upon his servants with such mothering mercy and tenderness. The lord does not blame his servant but realizes his fall isblameless, the result of excessive love and zeal. This excessive love told Julianhow God looks upon our sins: “And then I saw that only pain blames andpunishes, and our courteous Lord comforts and succours, and always he iskindly disposed to the soul, loving and longing to bring us to bliss.”

Having pondered this vision for many years, Julian sees it as the essential manifestationof the incarnation—how through love, sin and evil are transformed.In this sense, Julian’s whole theology is an extended meditation on thequestion of integration, of joining the fragmented human self into wholeness, a wholeness that in turn teaches us about the interconnectedness of the world.The intimacy shared between lord and servant establishes guidelines for a

35 LT 50, 266.36 LT 51, 267.37 Ibid. 274.38 Ibid. 271.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

human response to the problem of evil and sin. It is exemplified in the feminine,in the bond of love between Jesus and his mother, Mary.

Liz McAvoy’sinterpretation that the whole of the vision can be seen through the closeness of the mother-child relationship, is worth quoting at length:

Julian presents the mother-figure as the one who feels in her own body every hurther child receives, both physical or psychological, and so this lord feels the suffering of his servant and is united with him in his anguish. The pain of the fall unites themboth, just as the pain of childbirth and the suffering involved in the child’sacquisition of experience unites mother and child in a continuous cycle of reciprocity. The resultant effect of this feminization of language is the disruption of traditional masculinist absolutism embedded in the concept of vengeance and theassertion of the nurturing values of the maternal feminine both in a human anddivine context as a solution to the problem.

The mystical life drew Julian and Teresa into the dark night of their suffering savior’s pathos for human affliction. Constance FitzGerald asserts that this is the“point in life and prayer development [when] the images of the poor, the victimized, the oppressed, the exploited, and the suffering take on a clarity andsignificance that is overpowering.”

Mystical intimacy defends the primary of divine benevolence—God loves the world, suffers over it, and desires to see all well. It is participation in God’s witness, seeing the world from God’sperspective that subverts and contradicts the whole individualistic perception of reality. Awareness and compunction lead to healing—a desire to heal the suffering of others and to lift up the collective longing and pain of humanity—bringing all to a deep knowledge of God’s love. Teresa writes how God showed her theexperience of hell so she would understand the urgency of an ethical response totake action to mend the spiritual wounds. “I notice that if we see a person … with a great trial or suffering, it seems that our own very nature invites us tocompassion; and if their trial is great, we ourselves become distressed… . Noheart can bear it without great pain … this awareness also makes me desire thatin a matter so important we don’t grow satisfied with anything less than doing

39 For Christ and she were so united in love,” writes Julian, “that the greatness of her love was the cause of the greatness of her pain…. For always, the higher, the stronger, thesweeter that love is, the more sorrow it is to the lover to see the body which he loved inpain. …Here I saw a great unity between Christ and us, as I understand it; for when he was in pain we were in pain, and all creatures able to suffer pain suffered with him. LT18, 210.40 Liz Herbert McAvoy, “‘The Moders Service’: Motherhood as Matrix in Julian of Norwich,”

Mystics Quarterly

24 (1998) 4, 192.41 Constance FitzGerald, “Transformation in Wisdom: The Subversive Character andEducative Power of Sophia in Contemplation,” in

Carmel and Contemplation:Transforming Human Consciousness

, Kevin Culligan and Regis Jordan, eds. (Washington,DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 2000), 311 and 314.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

all we can on our part; let us neglect nothing, and may it please the Lord thatHe be served by giving us the grace to do all we can.”

Intimacy generates anethic of mutuality and compassion, a desire to share in and bring healing to thesorrows of others.

Ethic of

Amor Mundi

At the same time as I saw this sight of the head bleeding, our good Lord showed aspiritual sight of his familiar love. I saw that he is to us everything which is good and comforting for our help. He is our clothing, who wraps and enfolds us for love, embraces us and shelters us, surrounds us for his love, which is so tender that he may never desert us. And so in this sight I saw that he is everything which is good, as I understand.

Julian’s first revelation occupies nine chapters of her Long Text. It is a revelationof love in which all that follows is “founded and connected.”

In a mysticalcommentary on “his precious crowning of thorns,”

Julian expresses in thesechapters the union between God and the soul, the joy of the Trinity as “ourmaker … our protector, and our everlasting lover,”

and the familiar love in which God enfolds and embraces creation. While the vision is of Jesus’ bloodiedhead, the theology that emerges from it is one of flourishing, healing, and loving the world. Julian emphasizes that God wraps all of creation in love, caring foreven our humblest bodily needs, so that “we, soul and body, [are] clad andenclosed in his goodness.”

Her affirmation of the goodness of creation requiresa different attitude toward the world, an attitude that champions what Hannah Arendt called

amor mundi

, love of the world.

In emphasizing an ethic that isprimarily concerned with the flourishing of others, rather than on theprivatizing or spiritualizing of moral conduct, Julian displaces the relationshipbetween theology and ethics. Instead of “theological or metaphysical doctrinesforming the principles from which ethical rules and thus moral behavior can bederived,”

it is her understanding that everything “lasts and always will because

Life

, 32.6.43 LT, 5, 183.44 LT 1, 175.45 Ibid.46 LT 4, 181.47 LT 6, 186.48 See

Amor Mundi: Explorations in the Faith and Thought of Hannah Arendt

, James W.Bernauer, ed. (Boston/Dordrecht/Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1987. AlsoGrace M. Jantzen devotes an extended treatment to Arendt’s concept of

amor mundi

inher book

Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion

, Chapter 6.49 Jantzen,

Becoming Divine,

153.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

God loves it”

that forms the basis from which Julian’s thought and action aregenerated.The whole of this first revelation can be expressed in the juxtaposition Juliancreates between the bleeding and suffering Jesus and the vision of a tiny object,“no bigger than a hazelnut,” that Julian ponders lying in the palm of her hand.She asks about the meaning of this tiny hazelnut and is shown how God loves itinto existence. Love is at the center of being, it is love for which we are made;our essential core is pure, verdant, growing love—never stagnant or tainted. Thesweetness and tenderness with which God loves creation overflows from thehearts of those who are God’s lovers into a concern for all others: “In all this,” writes Julian, “I was greatly moved in love towards my fellow Christians, thatthey might all see and know the same as I saw, for I wished it to be a comfort tothem, for all this vision was shown for all men.”

Julian develops her understanding of

amor mundi

through her maturereflections on the motherhood of God, a distinctive addition to her Long Text.The divine motherhood becomes the paradigm in which she “has come torecognize the crucial nature of the feminine, particularly the maternal, to theunderstanding of God’s love for humanity and his attitude towards sin, and forher, the divine and the feminine are inseparable.”

The inseparable relationshipbetween the divine and the feminine transforms the whole of her text, shifting “Julian’s exegetic emphasis from the meaning of sin to that of unconditional,maternal love as the universal principle upon which the relationship between thehuman and divine is predicated.”

By associating the qualities of unconditionallove and mercy with the mother figure, Julian conveys a more embodied,physical sense of the healing of sins and the unity of the soul. Because themother’s service is ‘nearest, readiest, and surest,” writes Julian, “we are broughtback by the motherhood of mercy and grace into our natural place, in which we were created by the motherhood of love, a mother’s love which never leavesus.”

In 1388, more than fifteen years after her initial illness and revelations, Julian ponders the meaning of all that she has learned. At a time of social andpolitical unrest, and under the scourge of the Black Death, Julian witnessed and was no doubt aware of the trials of those outside her anchor hold.

It was, thus,her fervent desire to know more surely and profoundly the meaning of sin andsuffering in the context of the mystical understanding she was given that “all will

50 LT 5, 183.51 LT 8, 190.52 McAvoy, “‘The Moders Service,’193.53 Ibid.54 LT 60, 297.55 For further analysis see Jantzen,

Julian

, Chapter 1.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

be well and every kind of thing will be well.”

In the very last chapter of herLong Text, Julian writes, “and from the time it was revealed, I desired many times to know in what was our Lord’s meaning. And fifteen years after andmore, I was answered in spiritual understanding, and it was said: What, do you wish to know your Lord’s meaning in this thing? Know it well, love was hismeaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love. … And so I was taught that love is our Lord’smeaning. And I saw very certainly in this and in everything that before Godmade us he loved us, which love was never abated and never will be.”

Like Julian, Teresa is challenged to lift up sin and despair into an integratedtheology of love. Her quest to embrace the whole world in the arms of lovebegins with a very personal struggle to reconcile her worthlessness with Jesus’love for her. She battles this inner lack of self-love, due in large measure to herstatus as a woman in sixteenth century Spain.

But reflected in her self-struggleis the fracture of those who do not love, and those who inflict loveless-ness onothers. Teresa, as did Julian, learns that only in love can she cherish andempower herself, her monastic sisters, and her world. The self-hatred, self-loathing, and doubt that plague her inner thoughts must be given over to a higher acceptance, in which her personal failings are reconciled in the equality that love brings.

Teresa understands God’s love primarily as a spiritual love that takes place inthe depth of the soul. As God becomes intimate to the soul through loving union, Teresa is called to extend this ethic of healing to all souls brought intoher fold. Interior love becomes the primary basis of all external compassionateacts. “Once while I was reciting with all the Sisters the hours of the DivineOffice,” recounts Teresa, “my soul suddenly … seemed to me to be like a brightly polished mirror, … In its center Christ, our Lord, was shown to me, …as though in a mirror. And this mirror also … was completely engraved uponthe Lord Himself by means of a very loving communion I wouldn’t know how to describe.”

Yet, the spiritual love Teresa describes is not self-centered or otherworldly. Itis an act of love that bears the essential work of compassion for others; Teresa iscalled to achieve this equality of spiritual love in order to assist others in progressfor love of the world. It is a love with “no self-interest at all,” Teresa writes,because it imitates the love “which the good lover Jesus had for us.”

Further,

56 Short Text (hereafter ST) 13, 149.57 LT 86, 342.58 Consult Antonio Perez-Romero,

Subversion and Liberation in the Writings of St. Teresa of Avila

(Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi Press, 1996).59 One needs to read the whole of her

Life

to comprehend the depth of this struggle.60

Life

, 356.61

Way of Perfection

, 65–66.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

spiritual love is not dispassionate and unconcerned with another’s progress inlove; no, according to Teresa, it is the most impassioned love that costs the soul who loves dearly. Prayers, tears, and penances are part of the longing the loverhas for those who desire it, that they will find God and make progress in thegrowth of true love. The person pierced by the fiery arrow of love “doeseverything he can for the other’s benefit; he would lose a thousand lives that a little good might come to the other soul. O precious love,” Teresa praises, “thatimitates the Commander-in-chief of love, Jesus, our Good!”

Christ’s suffering is for love, we are made for love, are sins are held in love.Out of this mystical love, moral behavior bursts forth in a torrent of desire. It islove for the world, the foundational love of all creatures that unleashes pureaction and thought. Love engenders wellness, flourishing, and is resplendent inthe cycle of birthing, growing, and replenishing that brings forth the diversity of creation. This ethic of natality, of birth and growing, loves the world toward itshighest potential.

Straight out of the divine heart, again and again, Julian andTeresa are compelled toward Jesus’ mothering love, toward healing the fracturein consciousness that wounds love. Julian and Teresa arrive at a deeply feminine,gentle view of God. It is love that makes sin so painful, not punishment. Lovecannot bear the punishment of the lover; their theologies lead to an ethic of

amor mundi

, the world embraced and surrounded in love, shouldered by love,and longing to love. Out of this vision, they each strive to embody humility anddevotion as the clearest sign of grace. While the mystical writings of Julian and Teresa can be read as a repetitionof the preoccupation with the salvation of the individual soul, this would be a misreading of the primary impetus of their lives and teachings. It was notindividual freedom that they sought alone, but their desire to use this freedomin service of others. If one thing marks the writings of our two women masters,it is this intense compassion for the longings and pains of others, among themtheir sisters, neighbors, clergy, and friends. Infused into their texts, even amidst a rhetoric of dispassion and occasional contempt for the world (most prevalent inTeresa), is the importance of loving the world into being, celebrating itsflourishing, and working to mend its fractures and wounds. “The importantthing,” cautions Teresa, “is not to think much but to love much.”

62 Ibid, 65.63 See Jantzen,

Becoming Divine

, Chapter 6.64

Interior Castle

, 319.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Ethic of Dignification

[After they become nuns], they do not realize the great favor God has granted them inchoosing them for Himself, and by rescuing them from being subject to a man in the outside world; a man who often kills their bodies, and God forbid, could also kill their souls.“

As women mystics in societies acutely suspicious of females and contemplation, Julian and Teresa confronted their subordination and disempowerment as women. This confrontation becomes one of their most enduring ethicalcontributions, in which they reveal the soul wounds that generate moral weakness and failure, and the contemplative processes that move them fromfragmentation to wholeness, dignity and empowerment. If the goal of themystical life is becoming divine, something that Julian and Teresa both longedand prayed for with fervor and intention, then whatever impedes that realizationis against ethics. The ethic of perfection that fuels their longing is dynamically related to and culminates in an ethic of dignification. To love as God lovesrequires a healing of the wounds that fracture self-love and divide a personagainst oneself. In becoming divine, they must suffer the reign of self-violence,of an internalized social self-hate. Julian and Teresa cannot share in the fullnessof an integrated intimacy, without accepting their self worth and equality in theeyes of God. As discussed above, Julian conceptualizes this journey through Jesus-Sophia,the motherhood of God. Through the image of Jesus as our mother, Julian works out her equality and dignity of personhood, and the sinless-ness of herfellow Christians. During the period between the writing of Short and Long Texts, the harsh language Julian uses to describe herself as woman is greatly reduced, and in its place is a clear insight into her role and authority as a womanmystic. In the Short Text, Julian cautions the reader to “disregard the wretched worm, the sinful creature to whom it [revelation] was shown;”

but the similarpassage in the Long Text is changed, and the deprecating language substantially eliminated. Although she uses the rhetoric of frailty, weakness, and ignorance todescribe herself, she also asserts “because I am a woman, ought I therefore tobelieve that I should not tell you of the goodness of God?”

The subtlety andnuance of her awareness and critique of women’s status is illustrative of theimportance Julian places on the empowerment that comes from embracing thefeminine.

Foundations

, 306; this translation taken from Perez-Romero,

Subversion and Liberation

,178–79.66 ST 6, 133.67 Ibid. 135.

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

It is in Teresa, however, that we can trace a women’s battle with spiritualoppression distinctive to her gender. In her negotiation of the soul’s journey,Teresa draws away from conventional definitions of women’s spiritual benefitsas well as from traditional women’s roles. As she matures in her spiritual life,Teresa confronts a deeper, and more radical fracture that inhabits herconsciousness, and battles to recognize the misogyny that is at the bottom of her self-doubt and worthlessness as a woman.This brokenness for Teresa is further instigated by the assault on herspiritual life by powerful male confessors intent on keeping her subordinated.The presumption of male domination over the most private and solitary aspectsof Teresa’s life—her right to holiness and spiritual authority—was a manifestation of a deeper and more insidious spiritual oppression. Suspicionsof heresy, accusations of being “from the devil” and other overt forms of violence against Teresa repeat on a physical level a prior spiritual privilege that was asserted by men over women’s interior lives.

Codified in scripture andinstitutionalized by religious and secular law, rights granted men to invadeTeresa’s inviolable solitude led to serious psychological, political, and spiritualconsequences for her. Spiritual domination, which under girded the economicand social marginalization of women and their historical status as a permanentunderclass in sixteenth century Spain, created hidden scars in Teresa’s soul—scars that could be healed only as she learns to map the contemplative processthat takes her through her “dark night of the feminine” and into the blinding love of dignity and intimacy, alone with her Beloved.

In her later works, Teresa introduces the theme of the empowerment anddignity of women through highlighting the great perfection and virtue that hernuns were able to achieve. Teresa wants her sisters to achieve spiritualdiscipleship, as she herself aspires to be an apostle who brings souls to God.

Her longing to have her petitions of mercy and justice heard ignite her texts; atthe same time she is acutely aware of the judgment inflicted on her and hersisters. “Is it not enough, Lord,” she writes, “that the world has intimidated us[women] … so that we may not do anything worthwhile for You in public ordare speak some truths that we lament over in secret, without Your also failing to hear so just a petition? I do not believe, Lord, that this could be true of Yourgoodness and justice, for You are a just judge and not like those of the world.

68 For a contemporary analysis of the issue, see Kathleen Fischer, “Violence Against Women: The Spiritual Dimension,” in Kathleen Fischer,

Women at the Well: Feminist Perspectives on Spiritual Direction

(New York: Paulist Press, 1988), 154–174.69 For development of the term “dark night of the feminine”see Lanzetta “The Soul of Woman and the Dark Night of the Feminine,” paper presented at the AAR WesternRegion, University of California, David, March 23, 2003.70

Interior Castle

, 7.4.14.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Since the world’s judges are sons of Adam and all of them men, there is no virtue in women that they do not hold suspect.”

It is in her

Foundations

that her attempts to make actual the ethics of perfection and deification are most apparent. She wishes to lift up human reality to reflect the experiences of love, mercy, and compassion she perceived in hermystical visions. Against the harsh treatment of women and girls, she would pitthe final test of love, in which she was taught by Love itself the worth Godbestows on women. Through her community of sisters, she repels the injusticeand violence against women and resists the social order by harvesting hermystical knowledge for political purposes. In response to the cultural preferencefor males, Teresa extolled the virtues of women and the shame of parents whodo not realize “the great blessings that can come to them through daughters orof the great sufferings that can come from sons.”

An astute observer and critic of the social order, Teresa chaffed under a system in which money, honor, and prestige were seen to be the heights of sophistication. She contrasted this ignorance with the truth of the soul’s equality in Jesus’ heart; and she actualized this insight by recognizing that “lineage andsocial status mattered not at all in the judgment of God.”

Teresa describes a number of women who desire to be monastics who were whipped and punishedby their families, or who disfigured themselves in order to avoid marriage. Theconversion of one of these women, Catalina Godinez, gave Teresa “a new definition of lineage” that passed from the material and economic to thespiritual.

Teresa recounts how after reading the inscription on a crucifix “theLord worked a complete change in her. She [Catalina Godinez] had beenthinking of a marriage that was being sought for her, which was better than shecould have hoped for, and saying to herself, “With what little my father iscontent, that I become connected with an entailed estate; I am thinking of becoming the origin of a new line of descendents.”

In addition to contributing to the renewal of the Carmelite Order and thefounding of seventeen monasteries, Teresa also helped

conversos

—Jews convertedto Christianity—by admitting them into her monasteries on the basis of theirpiety and suitability for the religious life.

By accepting their financial and

Way of Perfection

, 3.7, 51.72

Foundations

, 20.3. 198.73

Foundations

, 15.16, 175.74 Carole Slade, “Teresa of Avila as a Social Reformer,” in

Mysticism and Social Transformation

, 102.75

Foundations

, 22.5, 209.76 A descendent of a

converso

family, Teresa maintained an awareness of social injustices allher life. This sensitivity was no doubt related to her family history and to the publicconfession her paternal grandfather was forced to make in 1485 over his secret practice of Judaism. A number of important works on the Jewish influences on Teresa’s spirituality

B. J. Lanzetta, Contemplative Ethics

logistical support, she afforded their families the social prestige and religiousconsolation that derived from endowing religious institutions.

A spiritualfoundation replaced the material basis for prestige and wealth; Teresa wouldhave agreed with Julian that all our sufferings would be turned into honors.

The radicalness of this insight bore “heroic deeds” in Teresa. ConstanceFitzGerald contends that Teresa’s contemplative life led her to be a champion of social and religious reforms, in which she:

Envisioned, in fact, a new social order where all were to be equal. In her smallcommunities of contemplative women, Teresa set in motion a reversal of the socialand religious order by a spiritual one that would eradicate the highest principles of the established order and undermine the current images of social status. Her fearlessstruggle to destroy concern for honor and wealth, and therefore uphold the value of the person over money and ancestry, her unswerving struggle for the recognition of women’s rights to deep interior prayer and therefore to significant service in theChurch at the time of great ecclesial danger and turmoil …

Intimacy and love for the world exerted a powerful influence on healing theroots of violence that generated suffering and diminished Julian and Teresa as women in society and church. In effect, identification with Jesus’ suffering facebecomes the force that compels them toward healing the wounds that inhabittheir consciousness, as well as the spiritual and social pains of others. Frommystical intimacy, they discover God’s equality of love as they reach out touphold this ethic of loving the world into being. But deeper still, they confrontthe primacy of dignity as an ethic that must become part of the social good. It isnot enough to experience the heights of mystical union; this experience mustbecome the fire that burns away the dross of inferiority, self-loathing, and self-doubt. Julian and Teresa risk bearing the

theosis

of the world. The ethics of perfection, as the journey toward deification, culminates for them in an ethic of dignification in which they assert their spiritual authority as the impetus forchurch and societal reform.

and thought have been written. Consult, Deirdre Green,

Gold in the Crucible: Teresa of Avila and the Western Mystical Tradition

(Longmead, England: Element Books, 1989);Catherine Swietlicki,

Spanish Christian Cabala: The Works of Luis de Leon, Santa Teresade Jesus, and San Juan de la Cruz

(Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986);Gareth Alban Davies, “St. Teresa and the Jewish Question,” in

Teresa de Jesus and her World

, edited by Margaret A. Rees (Leeds: Trinity and All Saints College, 1981);Teofanes Egido, “The Historical Setting of St. Teresa’s Life, translated by M. Dodd andS. Payne,

Carmelite Studies

, I, 1980.77 See Carole Slade, 100.78 “He wants us to know that it [pain or humiliation] will all be turned to our honour andprofit by the power of his Passion, and to know that we suffered in no way alone, buttogether with him, and to see in him our foundation.” LT 28, 227.79 Constance FitzGerald, “A Discipleship of Equals: Voices from Tradition,” 91.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

concerned primarily with technical problems in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, and that it was only as a result of his wartime service and his wartime reading of Tolstoy’s

The Gospel in Brief

that the interests in thephilosophical work he was writing broadened out to include the realm of “higher things”—i.e. ethics, aesthetics, religion, God, the meaning of life, andthe mystical. According to this theory, the wartime confrontation with deathand suffering, in conjunction with his reading of Tolstoy, produced in Wittgenstein a profound change in the very core of his personality and thischange came to be reflected in the nature and purpose of the

Tractatus.

From a very technical and rather dry treatise on logic in the tradition of Frege, Russell,and Whitehead, the

Tractatus

, according to this explanation, broadened out toinclude moral and spiritual wisdom.Bertrand Russell laid the groundwork for much of the Foxhole ReligionTheory in his 1951 obituary article on Wittgenstein in the British journal

Mind.

In the last paragraph of that article Russell explained how Wittgenstein’sinterests, which in the years he had known him at Cambridge between 1911 and1914 had been almost exclusively in the realm of logic, changed during the waras a result of his chance reading of Tolstoy:

He was in the days before 1914 concerned almost solely with logic. During orperhaps just before, the first war, he changed his outlook and became more or less of a mystic, as may be seen here and there in the

Tractatus.

He had been dogmatically anti-Christian, but in this respect he changed completely. The only thing he evertold me about this was that once in a village in Galicia during the war he found a bookshop containing only one book, which was Tolstoy on the Gospels. He boughtthe book, and, according to him, it influenced him profoundly.

Ray Monk develops the Foxhole Religion Theory at considerably greater lengththan Russell and argues that Wittgenstein’s purpose in writing the

Tractatus

completely changed by 1916 from what it had been at the beginning of the warand that the change came about not merely because of Wittgenstein’s reading of

The Gospel in Brief

in the late summer of 1914, but also because of the dangersand hardships of the war itself and the religious-type conversion that thesehelped to produce in Wittgenstein. One of the major reasons Wittgensteinenlisted in the war, Monk contends, was because of the purification andspiritual transformation for which Wittgenstein yearned. “What Wittgenstein wanted from the war,” Monk writes, “was a transformation of his wholepersonality, a ‘variety of religious experience’ that would change his lifeirrevocably.” “In this sense,” he continues, “the war came for him just at theright time, at the moment when his desire to ‘turn into a different person’ wasstronger even than his desire to solve the fundamental problem of logic” (112).

Mind,

volume lx, number 259, July, 1951, 298.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

Monk stresses the impact on Wittgenstein’s spiritual development of Tolstoy no less than Russell does, but he sees this impact as affecting Wittgenstein’sphilosophical writing only after an interval of two years. It was Tolstoy

inconjunction with

the crucible of his wartime experience, Monk contends, thatultimately transformed the

Tractatus

from a treatise on logic to a work combining logic and religious mysticism. On this Monk writes:

During his first month in Galicia, he entered a bookshop, where he could find only one book: Tolstoy’s

Gospel in Brief.

The book captivated him. It became for him a kind of talisman: he carried it wherever he went, and read it so often that he cameto know whole passages of it by heart. He became known to his comrades as “theman with the gospels.” For a time he … became not only a believer, but anevangelist, recommending Tolstoy’s

Gospel

to anyone in distress. … His logic andhis thinking about himself being two aspects of the single “duty to oneself,” thisfervently held faith was bound to have an influence on his work. And eventually itdid—transforming it from an analysis of logical symbolism in the spirit of Fregeand Russell into the curiously hybrid work which we know today, combining as itdoes logical theory with religious mysticism. But such an influence does not becomeapparent until a few years later.

(115–116)

Monk is quite explicit on the impact of Wittgenstein’s confrontation with deathand suffering during the war, and goes so far as to declare that if Wittgensteinhad sat on the sidelines during the conflict and not seen action, the

Tractatus

would have been a radically different work than the work that has come down tous:

If Wittgenstein had spent the entire war behind the lines, the

Tractatus

would haveremained what it almost certainly was in its first inception of 1915: a treatise on thenature of logic. The remarks in it about ethics, aesthetics, the soul and the meaning of life have their origin in precisely the “impulse to philosophical reflection” thatSchopenhauer describes, an impulse that has as its stimulus a knowledge of death,suffering and misery. (137)

Monk sees the major change in Wittgenstein and in the purpose of the

Tractatus

to have come about as a direct result of the Austrian Army’s bloody clash withthe Russians in the summer of 1916. The logical and the mystical aspects of Wittgenstein’s thought were indelibly fused together, he claims, as a result of Wittgenstein’s confrontation with death during this violent campaign on theEastern Front:

In June [1916] Russia launched its long-expected major assault, known, after thegeneral who planned and led it, as the “Brusilov Offensive.” Thus began some of theheaviest fighting of the entire war. The Austrian Eleventh Army, to which Wittgenstein’s regiment was attached, faced the brunt of the attack and sufferedenormous casualties. It was at precisely this time that the nature of Wittgenstein’s work changed. On 11 June his reflections on the foundations of logic are

14 Monk, 115–116.

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

interrupted with the question: “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” He answers with a list [a list that includes reflections on the meaning of life,on the nature of God, the human will, and prayer] … It is as if the personal and thephilosophical had become fused; ethics and logic—the two aspects of the “duty tooneself”—had finally come together, not merely as two aspects of the same personaltask, but as two parts of the same philosophical work. (141–142)

Brian McGuinnes, in the first volume of his biography of Wittgenstein, takes a position almost identical to that of Monk in stressing the transforming effectupon Wittgenstein’s personality and thought of his confrontation with death inbattle in the year 1916. It was during the summer campaign of this year, saysMcGuinness, “somewhere between the shells and the bullets,” that the twostrands in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, the Russellian and the Dostoyevskian, were joined together to produce the single body of thought that would be presentedto the world in the

Tractatus.

Presenting the Foxhole Religion Theory in perhapsits pithiest formulation, McGuinnes writes:

We have mentioned … that the implications for

Weltweisheit

—for the philosophy of life—of his technical philosophy were not always apparent to him, though no doubtthey were unconsciously part of his motivation. But now, in this the worst summerof danger and defeat [i.e. the summer of 1916], somewhere between the shells andthe bullets, he began to feel that the two were connected; that grasping the essenceof propositions or of an operation had something to do with adopting the rightattitude towards life. No longer does his attitude towards his philosophy merely exhibit the same structure as his attitude towards life: the two are now identified.The critic of Russell is fused in the reader of Dostoevsky. Wittgenstein’s firstphilosophy (and much of his later personality) is the fruit of that campaigning season.

In seeking to evaluate the Foxhole Religion Theory it must first be acknowl-edged that it is beyond question that Wittgenstein’s experiences during the First World War, both in reading Tolstoy and in facing death at the front, heightenedhis spiritual sensitivities and his interest in those “higher things” concerning God, the mystical, and the meaning of life that are dealt with in the last pages of the

Tractatus

(and prefigured in his

Notebook

entries from June to November1916). It is important to keep in mind, however, that Wittgenstein had had aninterest in these matters long before the summer of 1916, indeed, long beforethe First World War ever began. He had read Tolstoy’s

Hadji Murat

, forinstance, in the summer of 1912 and in a letter to Russell at this time heremarked on just how wonderful this work was.

In an earlier letter to Russell(July 22, 1912), he had spoken of how much he had profited from his reading of William James’s

Varieties of Religious Experience

, and how this work had

15 Brian McGuinness,

Wittgenstein: A Life

(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988),245.16 McGuinness, 33; Monk, 115–116.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

helped him to get rid of his

Sorge

(worry, anxiety, earthly cares). Perhaps moreimportantly, we know that the experience that Wittgenstein seems to haveregarded throughout his adult life as the quintessential religious or religio-mystical experience—the experience he describes in his 1929 “Lecture onEthics” as one of being “absolutely safe,” of being “safe in the hands of God”— was an experience be apparently had for the first time in 1910 or early 1911 inconjunction with the viewing of a play by the Austrian dramatist Ludwig Anzengruber.

According to remarks Wittgenstein once made to NormanMalcolm, it was this 1910/1911 experience that led to a change in his attitudetowards religion, which up until that time had apparently been quite hostile.

While Monk and McGuinness are well aware of this religio-spiritual interest of Wittgenstein existing prior to the First World War, and describe at considerablelength Wittgenstein’s intense prayer life during the early months of the war as Wittgenstein has recorded it in his wartime diaries, they see this interest ashaving no impact on his philosophical work until his direct confrontation withdeath at the front in 1916. Besides other difficulties with this interpretation,however, it can be shown to be false on purely textual grounds, for on May 25,1915—more that a year before the Brusilov Offensive—Wittgenstein made thefollowing important entry in his

Notebooks:

The urge towards the mystical comes from the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered ourproblem has not even been touched in the slightest. Of course there is then nolonger any question and this is precisely the answer.

In these remarks we can see some of the major “higher” themes of the

Tractatus

including a) the limitations of scientific propositions in dealing with what ismost important in human life, i.e. meaning, purpose, value, and communion with God; and b) the mystic-transcendent nature of the higher order reality thatalone confers meaning, purpose and value on human life. The substance of theseremarks would later be taken over directly in two propositions of the

Tractatus

—propositions 6.52 and 6.522—where they play a crucial role insetting forth its dominant religion-mystical theme. Wittgenstein says there:

We feel that even if all possible scientific questions have been answered our lifeproblems have not even been touched in the slightest. Of course there is then nolonger any question and this is precisely the answer.There is, of course, that which cannot be put into words. It

shows

itself. It is theMystical.

17 Monk, 51.18 Norman Malcolm,

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir

(Oxford University Press, London,1977), 70.

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

Besides its textual and chronological problems, however, the Foxhole ReligionTheory aslo suffers from one of the same defects as the Divided Self Theory,namely, Wittgenstein himself always seems to have seen the logical and thereligio-mystical aspects of his

Tractatus

as forming a seamless garment (and not a chronologically-conditioned “hybrid”), and is never known to have revealed toanyone that the original purpose of his philosophical writing had undergone soradical a transformation as that which the Foxhole Religion Theory mustpostulate. One would suppose that if, as Ray Monk argues, “the WittgensteinEngelmann met in 1916 was not the same as the Wittgenstein Russell had metin 1911,” and that, as a result of this change, his “purpose in writing the

Tractatus”

was also not the same (149), then no one would have been moreaware of this, and understood it better, than Wittgenstein himself, who, afterall, was a most reflective of human beings. Yet such a transformation was neverpart of Wittgenstein’s own interpretation of his philosophical endeavors over theperiod 1911 to 1918.

Indeed, the opposite is the case. As W. Donald Hudson

19 Ray Monk and Brian McGuinness both claim (see Monk, 142, 145, 149; andMcGuinness, 78, 145) that a brief one-sentence remark Wittgenstein entered in his

Notebooks

on August 2, 1916, is an acknowledgement on Wittgenstein’s part of theradical chronological shift in his interests during the summer of that year from logic tothe “higher things” about God, morality, the meaning of life, etc. that would later beincorporated into the final pages of the

Tractatus.

Wittgenstein stated on that occasionthe following: “Indeed, my work has expanded from the foundations of logic to thenature of the world.” This statement, however, will not bear the interpretation Monk and McGuinness have put on it. Indeed, it may not be a chronological statement at allbut a statement about the very broad scope that Wittgenstein’s logical inquiries hadalways assumed, or at least had assumed from the time he dictated his extensive notes toG.E. Moore in Norway in April 1914. At least from the time of the Moore

Notes

, Wittgenstein had seen his inquiries into the logical properties of language as providing not only an insight into the nature of linguistic reality, but a key to understanding thebasic nature and structure of the entire universe. The key

Tractatus

themes of theisomorphism between language and the world, and the claim that basic structuralproperties of the world are

shown

by the logic of language but cannot be stated inlanguage is first developed extensively at this time. (The Moore

Notes

are reproduced in Appendix II of Miss Anscombe’s translation of the

Notebooks

).The remark which Monk and McGuinness want to read so much into, and which they claim is an acknowledgment of the radical reorientation of Wittgenstein’s interestsresulting from his confrontation with death in battle on the Russian front, would seem tobe saying little more than what Wittgenstein had said previously in much earlier

Notebook

entries, for instance, in the following from January 22, 1915: “My task consists

entirely

of this: to explain the nature of the proposition. That is, to give the nature of allfacts whose picture

the proposition. To give the nature of all being.”McGuinness, it should be remarked, is much less satisfied with the Foxhole ReligionTheory than is Monk, as he qualifies it considerably, and, as in the passage quoted in thetext, indicates that the implications of Wittgenstein’s logical inquiries for his philosophy of life—i.e. his philosophy of the “higher things” that dominate the

Tractatus

from 6.4 tothe end of the work—were at least “unconsciously” present from a period long before the

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

so succinctly states the matter in his thoughtful book on

Wittgenstein and Religious Belief

, Wittgenstein himself “conceived of the argument of the

Tractatus

as a unity and saw his conclusions concerning the mystical in 6.4 to 7as following from his discussion of the structure of language in the earlier partof the book.”

Had Wittgenstein’s purpose in writing the

Tractatus

undergone a radical change in the 1916–1918 period, Wittgenstein surely would haveunderstood this better than anyone else, and presumably would have explainedthis fact to at least some of those with whom he discussed the work atconsiderable length (e.g. Engelmann, Russell, Ramsey, Schlick, Waismann,Drury, Malcolm, Anscombe).Even if one were to accept the basic contention of the Foxhole ReligionTheory that the religio-mystical interests of the

Tractatus

were largely theproduct of Wittgenstein’s experience during the First World War, one is still left with the problem of how to explain the existence in the same book of Tolstoyanmysticism with a theory of logic and language that appears to deprecate alldiscourse about God, ethical virtue, and the meaning of life by ascribing to itthe status of nonsense. The Wittgenstein Problem, in other words, is notanswered merely by saying that Wittgenstein’s philosophical interests from1911–1915 were almost exclusively with logical theory and then broadened outin the 1916–1918 period to include religious mysticism and ethics, for one still would have to explain how the logical theory in the

Tractatus

—and particularly its logical positivist and anti-metaphysical features—is related to its ethical and

bullets and the shells began to fly. Even though the implications of his logical inquiriesfor his philosophy of life first became clear to him only in the summer of 1916,McGuinness argues, “it seems,” he says, “that there was from the start a connexionbetween the interest he acquired in the philosophy of mathematics and the first gropingsof his thought about the philosophy of life” (78). What was previously unconscious, oronly partially conscious, was thus brought to full consciousness, McGuinness believes, asa result of the frightful experience of the war. Elsewhere in his biography McGuinness writes: “That [Wittgenstein] prayed during the First War and that his reading then wasintensely Christian, we shall in due course see, but this was noted as a striking change by Russell, who had the impression before the war that Ludwig was hostile to religion.Russell was surely right in detecting a change, but as far back as we have indications of Ludwig’s inner life, his thoughts ran to sin and guilt and good and evil spirits, much of the machinery of religion and eschatology seemed to be for him the natural expression of moral realities” (43).In contrast to McGuinness, the claim of this paper (as well as of the author’s larger work on Witgenstein) is that the implications of his logical inquiries for the “higherthings” embodied in his mystic, spiritual, and theocentrically-based moral philosophy were conscious from the very beginning, and that Wittgenstein’s very purpose in taking up the study of logic under Bertrand Russell was to preserve, against profanation anddebasement, the “wholly other” sacrality and subliminity of the realm of the mystictransport. (See Russell Nieli,

Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language

, StateUniversity of New York Press, Albany, 1987).20 (The Macmillian Press, LTD, London, 1975, 69).

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

religio-mystical strains. The Foxhole Religion Theory, in short, is not much of an answer to the problem that has been posed in this paper.

The Non-Discursive Language Theory

If neither the Divided Self Theory nor the Foxhole Religion Theory provide anadequate answer to the Wittgenstein Problem, a more promising possibility isoffered by the Non-Discursive Language Theory. This theory received its mostimportant formulation in Alan Janik and Stephen Toulmin’s

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

a work which is worth considering at some length within the presentcontext since it develops the Non-Discursive Language Theory in a manner thatmany have found convincing and the book continues to be one of the mostinfluential works of exegetical revisionism on the

Tractatus

some thirty yearsafter its first publication in the early 1970 s.In the Introduction to their work Janik and Toulmin identify “the centralparadox of the

Tractatus

” as that of reconciling “the ‘ethical’ Wittgenstein withthe ‘logical’ Wittgenstein.” “Anyone who tries to understand the

Tractatus

,” they explain, is “confronted with two contrasting views about the very subject matterof the book.” These, they say, “may be referred to, for convenience, as the‘ethical’ and the ‘logical’ interpretations” (25). “After some seventy pagesapparently devoted to nothing but logic, theory of language and the philosophy of mathematics or natural science,” Janik and Toulmin declare, “we are suddenly faced by five concluding pages (propositions 6.4 on) in which our heads areseemingly wrenched around and we are faced with a string of dogmatic thesesabout solipsism, death and ‘the sense of the world’ which ‘must lie outside the world’” (25). “Were these last reflections about ethics, value and ‘the problemsof life’,” Janik and Toulmin ask, “mere claptraps, makeweights, or privateafterthoughts? Or do they have some integral connection with the main text, which the familiar interpretation overlooks?” (23). In answering this question, Janik and Toulmin contend not only that the final discussion of “higher things” was intended as an integral part of the

Tractatus

, but that the earlier sections onlogic, mathematics, and the philosophy of language were instrumental indeveloping the religious, ethical, and aesthetic themes with which the work concludes. The final pages of the

Tractatus

, they suggest, “were not intended as a string of

obiter dicta

thrown in as an afterthought or makeweight, but … are—as their position suggests—meant to be the climax of the book” (168).The

Tractatus

according to Janik and Toulmin’s interpretation is thus seen asa unified philosophical treatise with a unified ethical purpose, and this purpose,they contend, was one Wittgenstein intended from the very beginning of his

21 (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1973).

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

work on the book. Indeed, the main problem with which the

Tractatus

deals, Janik and Toulmin hold, was one which preoccupied Wittgenstein even beforehe took up the study of logic under Bertrand Russell in the year 1911. What Wittgenstein wanted to do in the

Tractatus

, they contend, was provide a theory of language that would distinguish factual and scientific discourse, on the onehand, from ethical, religious, and aesthetic discourse on the other. The lattersubject matter, they suggest, involves the realm of “subjective truth,” which Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, believed to be communicable only indirectly through poetry, fable, irony, satire and other non-discursive language forms. It was to protect the integrity of the subjective truth contained in poetry and theseother non-discursive modes of language, Janik and Toulmin assert, that Wittgenstein elaborated his theory of the discursive proposition and of therepresentational nature of all factual discourse. Wittgenstein, according to this view, utilized the logical theories developed by Russell and Frege to grasp moreclearly the nature of discursive propositions, but this desire to illuminatediscursive language, Janik and Toulmin believe, was itself intimately connected with his more important aim of revealing the true nature of non-discursivelanguage. Janik and Toulmin’s version of the Non-Discursive Language Theory is well-represented in the following remarks:

Wittgenstein is trying to set the ethical off from the sphere of rational discourse,because he believes that it is more properly located in the sphere of the poetic. …Language can present experience, but it can also infuse experience with meaning.The former is possible because the propositions that represent facts are models witha logical structure. The latter is poetry. … Language can thus represent facts by means of propositions, or alternatively convey emotions in poems. The aim of the

Tractatus

is to distinguish the two, and thereby protect them from confusion. (193)The problem on which Wittgenstein embarked—according to our hypothesis—wasthat of constructing a general critique of language capable of showing, at one andthe same time,

both

that logic and science had a proper part to play within ordinary descriptive language by which we produce a representation of the world analogousto a mathematical model of physical phenomena,

and

that questions about “ethics, value and the meaning of life,” by falling outside the limits of this descriptivelanguage, become—at best—the objects of a kind of mystical insight, which can beconveyed by “indirect” or poetical communication. (191)… the problem with which Wittgenstein was originally preoccupied, and whichdetermined the goal at which the writing of his

Tractatus

was directed … [was oneof] reconciling the physics of Herz and Boltzmann with the ethics of Kierkegaardand Tolstoy, within a single consistent exposition. (168)The philosophy of the

Tractatus

is an attempt to show, from the very nature of propositions, that poetry does not consist of propositions. In this world-view, poetry is the sphere in which the

sense

of life is expressed, a sphere which therefore cannotbe described in

factual

terms. … In science, we want to know the facts; in theproblems of life, facts are unimportant. In life, the important thing is the capacity to

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

respond to the suffering of another. It is a matter of right feeling. … The vehicle forconveying feeling, which has the primary role in life, is the poem or the fable. (195)Subjective truth is communicable only indirectly, through fable, polemics, irony,and satire. This is the only way that one can come to “see the world aright.” (198)

As a solution to the Wittgenstein Problem the Non-Discursive LanguageTheory—at least the version developed by Janik and Toulmin—would seem tobe a considerable improvement over both the Divided Self Theory and theFoxhole Religion Theory. Unlike either of these other two theories, it presentsthe

Tractatus

as a unified whole with an overriding religio-ethical purpose, which we know from an important letter Wittgenstein wrote to the publisherLudwig von Ficker was how Wittgenstein himself saw his work. Moreover, weknow from various sources that Wittgenstein had considerable sympathy for the view that the “higher truths” underlying ethics, aesthetics, and religion were bestconveyed through various indirect means rather that presented directly in theform of factual propositions. This is made clear in remarks Wittgenstein oncemade in a letter to Paul Engelmann about a poem by Uhland,

as well as in a remark he once made orally to Norman Malcolm concerning Tolstoy’s writings.

Finally, the Non-Discursive Language Theory can explain, in a way that the Divided Self Theory and the Foxhole Religion Theory cannot, why Wittgenstein might want to deprecate metaphysical propositions, sincemetaphysical discourse, if carried out in the mode of factual/scientific language,might easily be seen as usurping the domain of the poetic and leading to greatmuddle and confusion as a result.

22 The poem by Uhland narrates the story of a count who clipped a tiny sprig from a hawthorn bush, placed it in his iron helmet, and carried it with him in battle and back home across the sea. He then placed the sprig in the ground and over the years watched itgrow into a tree. In his old age the count sat under the tree, which would remind him of his youth and his earlier journey in a far-off land. Wittgenstein, who was sent a copy of the poem by Engelmann, was apparently moved by the delicate tone and texture of thepoem’s narrative, and in a letter to Engelmann praised Uhland’s work for capturing theUnutterable (

das Unausprechliche

) without trying to express it directly. Wittgenstein wrote to Engelmann: “The Uhland poem is really magnificent. And this is how it is: If one doesn’t try to utter the Unutterable then

nothing

gets lost. But the Unutterable willbe—unutterably—

contained

in what has been said” (Engelmann, 6).23 Wittgenstein once told Malcolm that Tolstoy was more effective when his message was“latent” in a story—i.e. indirectly or obliquely contained in it—than when he talked tothe reader directly. Didactic moralism and didactic religiosity always seem to haverepelled Wittgenstein. To Malcolm he said: “I once tried to read [Tolstoy’s novel]

Resurrection

but couldn’t. You see, when Tolstoy just tells a story he impresses meinfinitely more than when he addresses the reader. When he turns his back to the readerthen he seems to me

most

impressive. Perhaps one day we can talk about this. It seems tome his philosophy is most true when it’s

latent

in the story” (Malcolm, 43).

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100

The Non-Discursive Language Theory, however, suffers from a fatal flaw,namely, the simple fact that the

Tractatus

itself says absolutely nothing aboutpoetry, fable, satire, parable, or any other non-discursive mode of language.Moreover, it is clear both from the actual text of the work and from theextensive criticism of some of its core doctrines that Wittgenstein made in hislater writings, that at the time of writing the

Tractatus

, Wittgenstein believedthat language constituted a “formal unity”

with “

one

comprehensive essence,”

whose nature could be discovered through logical analysis. This one all-embracing essence was seen to lie in a modeling or picturing function and allmeaningful language was said to consist of factual-discursive propositions, which in their totality constituted the whole of natural science. All factual

24 In the

Philosophical Investigations

Wittgenstein saw the attempt to grasp a single essenceof language—what he himself had attempted to do in the

Tractatus

—as an illusion: “Weare under the illusion that what is peculiar, profound, essential in our investigation,resides in its trying to grasp the incomparable essence of language. That is, the orderexisting between the concepts of proposition, word, proof, truth, experience, and so on.This order is a

super

-order between—so to speak—

super

-concepts. Whereas, of course, if the words ‘language,’ ‘experience,’ ‘world,’ have a use, it must be as humble a one as thatof the words ‘table,’ ‘lamb,’ ‘door,’ …” (PI 97)“The strict and clear rules of the logical structure of propositions appear to us assomething in the background—hidden in the medium of the understanding. … Theideal, as we think of it, is unshakable. You can never get outside it; you must always turnback. There is no outside; outside you cannot breathe. Where does this idea come from?It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It neveroccurs to us to take them off” (PI 102–103).“When we believe that we must find that order, must find the ideal, in our actuallanguage, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily called ‘propositions,’ ‘words,’‘signs’. The proposition and the word that logic deals with are supposed to be something pure and clear-cut. … The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharperbecomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a

result of investigation:

it was a requirement). … We see that what wecall ‘sentence’ and ‘language’ has not the formal unity that I imagined, but is the family of structures more or less related to one another. … The

preconceived idea

of crystallinepurity can only be removed by turning our whole examination around” (PI 105, 107,108).25 “We now have a

theory

, a ‘dynamic theory’ of the proposition; of language, but it doesnot present itself to us as a theory. For it is the characteristic thing about such a theory that it looks at a special clearly intuitive case and says: ‘

That

shews how things are inevery case; this case is the exemplar of

all

cases.’—‘Of course! It has to be like that’ wesay, and are satisfied. We have arrived at a form of expression that

strikes us as obvious.

But it is as if we had now seen something lying

beneath

the surface. The tendency togeneralize the case seems to have a strict justification in logic; here one seems completely

justified

in inferring: ‘If

one

proposition is a picture, then any proposition must be a picture, for they must all be of the same nature.’ For we are under the illusion that whatis sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping

one

comprehensive essence” (

Zettel

444).

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

101

propositions in the

Tractatus

were seen as truth functions of elementary propositions, which were said to be logical pictures of atomic facts consisting of immediate combinations of objects. Within the Tractarian system, meaningfullanguage was thus limited to picturing propositions, and what could not be saidthrough propositional language, it maintained, could not be said at all. Far frombeing, as Janik and Toulmin suggest, a defense of poetry, fable, parable andother non-propositional language forms, the

Tractatus

ignores non-propositio-nal modes of discourse entirely and confines the expressive capacity of meaningful language to descriptions of (non-transcendental) facts. Wittgenstein, it is true, believed during his Tractarian period that certainthings which could not be said in language could nevertheless be shown inlanguage, but the saying/showing distinction, which is of central importance tounderstanding the meaning of the

Tractatus

, has nothing whatever to do withany distinction between discursive and non-discursive language. The showing function of language that Wittgenstein describes in the

Tractatus

is always theshowing of either factual propositions, logical propositions, or mathematicalequations. There is no suggestion whatever in the

Tractatus

that there are certainforms of (non-discursive) language which have greater showing capacities thanothers. To use a metaphor from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, one might say that in the

Tractatus

all meaningful language is seen as a tool for making simplefactual descriptions, whether in natural science or in the everyday affairs of life,and there is only this one tool in the language-users toolbox. Janik and Toulmin are correct when they suggest that Wittgenstein wastrying to contrast in the

Tractatus

lower order truths which can be expressedthrough picturing propositions with certain types of transcendental truths whichcannot be so expressed, but the contrast Wittgenstein was making, as abundantevidence proves, was not between what can be expressed discursively and whatcan only be expressed through a non-discursive language medium, but between what can be expressed discursively and what cannot be expressed through any kind of language medium at all, and for this reason must be passed over insilence. That is, the contrast in the

Tractatus

is not between propositionallanguage and non-propositional language but between propositional languageand silence. The Preface and Conclusion to the

Tractatus

, as well as Wittgenstein’s important letter to von Ficker where he explains the overriding ethical purpose of his book, make this very plain:

The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what canbe said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over insilence. (Preface to the

Tractatus

)The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that hasnothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning

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102

to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the otherperson—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—

this

method would be the only strictly correct one. (Tr 6.54) What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence. (Tr 7)The book’s point is an ethical one. I once meant to include in the preface a sentence which is not in fact there now, but which I will write out for you here, because it willperhaps be a key to the work for you. What I meant to write, then, was this: My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have

not

written. And

it is precisely this second part that is the important one.

My book draws limits tothe sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this isthe ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where

many

others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it. And for that reason, unless I am very muchmistaken, the book will say a great deal that you yourself want to say. Only perhapsyou won’t see that it is said in the book. For now I would recommend you to readthe Preface and the Conclusion because they contain the most direct expression of the point of the book. (letter to Ludwig von Ficker)

Since the Non-Discursive Language Theory has been so influential in recentyears despite its obvious weaknesses, it may be worthwhile in the present contextto quote a statement from David Pears that reinforce much of what has beensaid here. When Wittgenstein, says Pears, “said that beyond the line of demarcation which he drew in the

Tractatus

there must be silence, he did notmerely mean that there must be scientific silence.” Rather, says Pears, “he meantthat any attempt to put nonscientific truths into words would necessarily distortthem by forcing them into the mold of scientific discourse.” “So religion, ethics,and aesthetics … all slide into the limbo reserved for transcendental subjects,because factual discourse really does occupy the dominant position—indeed theonly position.” Pears, however, goes on to explain that in Wittgenstein’s later work “the pressure exerted by those other kinds of discourse was going to changethe map of logical space.” “In the

Tractatus

,” he says, “[Wittgenstein] hadpushed them off the map, not, of course in any intolerant positivistic way, but ina subtle, sympathetic, transcendental way, and at least two of them, ethics andaesthetics, seem not to be amenable to this treatment.”

What Pears says here isclearly correct and despite the considerable attraction of the Non-DiscursiveLanguage Theory it must ultimately be rejected as false.

26 Quoted in Engelmann 143.27 David Pears,

Ludwig Wittgenstein

(The Viking Press, New York, 1969), 97–98.

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

103

The No-Relationship Theory

Before the publication of Janik and Toulmin’s work in the early 1970 s, themost common way of dealing with the Wittgenstein Problem was through what we might call the No-Relationship Theory. Interpreters of the

Tractatus

before

Wittgenstein’s Vienna

were generally aware of the fact that in addition to itsingenious system of logic and language, the

Tractatus

contained material onmysticism, ethics, the meaning of life, etc. But the tendency before Janik andToulmin’s book, at least among interpreters in Britain and America, was todownplay what Wittgenstein had to say about “higher things,” and to view thelogical and mystical aspects of his thinking as having little to do with oneanother. Although it was rarely stated openly, the No-Relationship Theory wasin part an outgrowth of the general impression many people had of Wittgenstein from the 1930 s through the 1960 s as a highly eccentric figureif not a kook. Both Norman Malcolm and George von Wright have giventestimony to the fantastic rumors and legends that often proliferated about Wittgenstein’s personality,

and it would seem to be only a very small step fromthe view of Wittgenstein as a brilliant but eccentric genius to the belief that a few of Wittgenstein’s ideas were highly idiosyncratic and did not harmonize well with the rest of his body of thought. Just as Sir Issac Newton had his interest inalchemy, the genius logician’s interest in mysticism and the meaning of lifecould easily be passed off, given such an understanding, as an aberration of littleconsequence for assessing the true meaning and value of his work.The No-Relationship Theory, however, became increasingly untenable fromthe late 1960 s to the present as more and more biographical material on Wittgenstein was made known to the general public and it became clear that Wittgenstein was not only a man of great personal integrity and greatseriousness of purpose, but that he was a person of extraordinary moral andspiritual depth whose moral and spiritual interests formed the very core of hisexistence.

The No-Relationship Theory is really not a solution to the

28 In his memoir Malcolm writes: “Wittgenstein was widely regarded by people who didnot know him, as a mysterious and eccentric figure. He was the object not only of hostility but also of innumerable fantastic rumors. Once in Cambridge I heard oneundergraduate in earnestness inform another that Wittgenstein delivered his lectures while lying on the floor and gazing at the ceiling. When he was living in my house in theStates it was reported that his residence was a barn and that I was the only person whocould have access to him. And later when he was living in a cottage on the Irish coast Iheard a grave rumor that he was herding goats in Turkey” (64).29 Perhaps nowhere is this brought out better than in Wittgenstein’s introduction to his

Philosophical Remarks:

“I would like to say, ‘This book is written to the glory of God,’but nowadays that would be chicanery, that is, it would not be rightly understood. Itmeans the book is written in good will, and in so far as it is not so written, but out of

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Wittgenstein Problem at all but a claim that no such problem exists. Now that we know the preeminent place that moral and spiritual concerns occupied in Wittgenstein’s hierarchy of interests, and know too that Wittgenstein himself saw his

Tractatus

as a tightly integrated work with an overriding religio-ethicalpurpose, the Wittgenstein Problem persists, and we must look elsewhere for a solution.

The

Via Negative

Theory

Having examined four possible answers to our initial interpretive problem andseen each in one way or another to be fundamentally flawed, we are back atsquare one and are still left with trying to explain how a treatise on logic andlanguage which consigned all moral and metaphysical discourse to the status of nonsense (and for this reason struck a very responsive chord with many members of the Vienna Circle), could have been written by a man who at thetime of writing the work was a Christian-influenced mystic in the mode of thelater Tolstoy. Why would anyone who could be so overwhelmed by a work like

The Gospel in Brief

, and drawn so heavily to thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Augustine, Silesius, Dostoyevsky and Blake, want to slight all talk about “higherthings”? The answer to our problem is provided by a fifth theory, which hasbeen designated here the

Via Negativa

Theory. Elements of the

Via Negativa

Theory can be found in the scattered statements of a number of writers,including Norman Malcolm, Maurice Drury, K. T. Fann, Karl Popper, andBrian McGuinness, but the fullest and most important elaboration of the theory is to be found in Paul Engelmann’s

Memoir

, as well as in the present writers own work on Wittgenstein.The

Via Negativa

Theory holds that from its very inception the

Tractatus

was an attempt to give expression to a higher level mystic-ecstatic experience (anexperience Wittgenstein had for the first time in late 1910 or early 1911) from which the world and its contents, together with language, could be viewed

subspecie aeternitatas

(that is, from the eternal or divine perspective). The

Tractatus

according to this interpretation, was concerned with distinguishing a logicalrealm of “the world,” whose contents could be exhaustively described throughpicturing propositions of the kind that exist in the natural sciences—propositions that exist

the world and that share the same logical structureas the world—from a mystical-transcendental-noumenal order that is beheld incertain types of religion-mystic experience. Wittgenstein, according to the

ViaNegativa

Theory, saw the mystical-transcendental-noumenal order as constitut-ing a

summun bonum

, and as such, as providing the ultimate source and

vanity, etc., the author would wish to see it condemned. He cannot free it of theseimpurities further than he himself is free of them” (Basil Blackwell, London, 1975).

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

105

Another writer James quotes makes the same point even more clearly, and hisremarks come close to what Wittgenstein would tell his student audience in1929 about the nature of being “absolutely safe”:

It is the experience of myriads of trustful souls, that this sense of God’s unfailing presence with them in their going out and in their coming in, and by night and day,is a source of absolute repose and confident calmness. It drives away all fear of whatmay befall them. That nearness of God is a constant security against terror andanxiety. It is not that they are at all assured of physical safety, or deem themselvesprotected by a love which is denied to others, but that they are in a state of mindequally ready to be safe or to meet with injury. If injury befall them, they will becontent to bear it because the Lord is their keeper, and nothing can befall them without his will. If it be his will, then injury is for them a blessing and no calamity at all. Thus and thus only is the trustful man protected and shielded from harm.(223)

Wittgenstein was subject throughout his early adulthood to morbid obsessions,deep depressions, and fears of going insane, and part of the “safety” that hisreligious experiences provided was not simply a sense of having overcome fearsof physical danger but relief from the psychic torment and the chaotic states thathis mind was periodically inclined to suffer. Parallels can be easily drawn to JohnBunyan, George Fox, and the later Tolstoy, as well as, on the archaic level, to thelabile psychic constitution associated with classic shamanism, as Eliade andothers have described it.

The type of hypersensitive personality that combinessuperior intellect with superior grasp of the deeper regions of inner space is a topic that James deals with quite thoroughly in his

Varieties

, and no doubt Wittgenstein took note of what James had to say on such matters.“The nature of genius,” says James, “has been illuminated by the attempts… to class it with psychopathical phenomena.” James goes on to explain:“Borderland insanity, crankiness, insane temperament, loss of mental balance,psychopathic degeneration (to use a few of the many synonyms by which it hasbeen called), has certain peculiarities and liabilities which, when combined witha superior quality of intellect in an individual, make it more probable that he will make his mark and affect his age, than if his temperament were lessneurotic. … The psychopathic temperament, whatever be the intellect with which it finds itself paired, often brings with it ardor and excitability of character. The cranky person has extraordinary emotional susceptibility. He isliable to fixed ideas and obsessions. His conceptions tend to pass immediately into belief and action: and when he gets a new idea, he has no rest till heproclaims it, or in some way ‘works it off.’” (36)This is at least a partially accurate description of Wittgenstein in the periodin which he wrote the

Tractatus.

But what James says next about religious genius

65 See Mircea Eliade,

Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy

(Princeton University Press,Princeton, New Jersey, 1964).

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138

and the psychopathic temperament is an almost uncannily prescient account of what Wittgenstein would go on to become in the years following his reading of the

Varieties

, and Wittgenstein doubtless found in James’s remarks in this regarda sympathetic understanding for his own spiritual and psychological condition:

Thus, when a superior intellect and a psychopathic temperament coalesce—as in theendless permutations and combinations of human faculty, they are bound tocoalesce often enough—in the same individual, we have the best possible conditionfor the kind of effective genius that gets into the biographical dictionaries. Such mendo not remain mere critics and understanders with their intellect. Their ideaspossess them, they inflict them, for better or worse, upon their companions or theirage. … In the psychopathic temperament we have the emotionality which is the

sine qua non

of moral perception; we have the intensity and tendency to emphasis whichare the essence of practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics andmysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sensible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament should introduce one toregions of religious truth, to corners of the universe, which your robust Philistinetype of nervous system, forever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, andthanking Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fiber in its composition, would besure to hide forever from its self-satisfied-possessor. If there were such a thing asinspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity. (37–38)

The ecstatic experience that gave birth to Wittgenstein’s

Tractatus

was surely such an “inspiration from a higher realm,” and the type of hypersensitive andlabile temperament that Wittgenstein possessed is well described here. One canalso derive from James’s analysis a better understanding of the relationshipbetween mysticism and morality in Wittgenstein. The hypersensitive psycho-pathic temperament, James believed—and the Quaker prophet George Fox represented the clearest example of this sort of temperament for James

—was

66 In speaking of those for whom religion exists “not as a dull habit, but an acute fever,” James writes: “But such individuals are ‘geniuses’ in the religious line; and like many other geniuses who have brought forth fruits effective enough for commemoration in thepages of biography, such religious geniuses have often shown symptoms of nervousinstability. Even more perhaps than other kinds of genius, religious leaders have beensubject to abnormal psychical visitations. Invariably they have been creatures of exaltedemotional sensibility. Often they have led a discordant inner life, and had melancholy during a part of their career. They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions andfixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, andpresented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological. … If youask for a concrete example, there can be no better one than is furnished by the person of George Fox. The Quaker religion which he founded is something which it is impossibleto overpraise. In a day of shams, it was a religion of veracity rooted in spiritualinwardness, and a return to something more like the original gospel truth than men hadever known in England. … [But] in point of spiritual sagacity and capacity, Fox’s mind was unsound. Everyone who confronted him personally, from Oliver Cromwell down tocounty magistrates and jailers, seems to have acknowledged his superior power. Yet from

R. Nieli, Mysticism, Morality and the Wittgenstein Problem

139

often privy to a range of noumenal experience that gave insight into a transcendental order of being from whence derived mankind’s highest moralaspirations and desires to do good. On the far side of human consciousness, hebelieved, man was called to a higher vocation than a life of self-centeredness andself-indulgence, and in attunement to this higher call, human beings fulfilled a higher moral purpose and their highest destiny. In the Conclusion to the

Varieties

James writes on this:

The further limits of our being plunge, it seems to me, into an altogether otherdimension of existence from the sensible and merely “understandable” world. Nameit the mystical region, or the supernatural region, whichever you choose. So far asour ideal impulses originate in this region (and most of them do originate in it, for we find them possessing us in a way for which we cannot articulately account), webelong to it in a more intimate sense than that in which we belong to the visible world, for we belong in the most intimate sense wherever our ideals belong. Yet theunseen region in question is not merely ideal, for it produces effects in this world. When we commune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in thenatural world upon our regenerative change. …God is the natural appelation, for us Christians at least, for the supreme reality,so I will call this higher part of the universe by the name of God. We and God havebusiness with each other; and in opening ourselves to his influence our deepestdestiny is fulfilled. The universe, as those parts of it which our personal being constitutes, takes a turn genuinely for the worse or for the better in proportion aseach one of us fulfills or evades God’s demands. (399–400)

Wittgenstein’s understanding of the relation between mysticism and ethics would be very similar to that expressed by James here. As we have seen in his“Lecture on Ethics” (1929), he spoke of ethical inquiry as a search for absolute value, for what is intrinsically sublime, for the absolute good, and for what giveshuman life its meaning. This search, he said, culminates in a supernatural visionof the ethical good that reveals an order of meaning and purpose beyond theorder of nature and the world. “God does not reveal himself

the world,” heproclaimed in his

Tractatus

; “ethics is transcendental” (Tr 6.432, 6.421). “Thesense of the world,” he wrote, “must lie outside the world.” “In the worldeverything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen:

it no valueexists—and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does

the point of view of his nervous constitution, Fox was a psychopath or

detraque

of thedeepest dye” (25). Needless to say, much of this description would fit Wittgenstein. [In a conversation with the present writer, Ray Monk explained that virtually everyone of themany dozens of people whom he interviewed for his biography who had had some kindof personal contact with Wittgenstein—including landladies and others with noacademic or intellectual training of any kind—found the intensity and power of Wittgenstein’s presence to be something truly extraordinary. On Wittgenstein’s labilepsychic constitution, his deep depressions, suicidal urges, and fears of going insane, seeNieli, chapter 4.]

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

140

From Prudence to Morality

A Case for the Morality of Some Forms of Nondualistic Mysticism

Daniel Z

elinski

[M]ystical consciousness should be, for those who possess it, a powerful motive and impulsion towards ethical, and therefore towards social, action.

—Walter Stace,

Mysticism and Philosophy [M]ystical-monistic experience…inevitably exists intension with any socially defined ethical system.

—Jeffery Kripal,

Crossing Boundaries

, “Debating theMystical as the Ethical: An Ideological Map“

Since the advent of modern academic studies of mysticism, the moral status of nondualistic mysticism has been a center of debate.

The charge thatnondualistic mysticism is essentially amoral stems from a perceived conceptualtension between nondualistic mystical awareness, an awareness of someparticular conception of the divine as an all-pervasive unity within whichthere are no distinct substances, and the social character of morality. Proponentsof this position claim that in leaving behind all substantial distinctions betweenindividual persons, these mystics also leave the realm of morality.

Ideal Foundationalism

The position that nondualistic mysticism is essentially amoral stands in sharpcontrast to the views of many early scholars of mysticism, such as Walter Staceand Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. They both saw nondualistic mystical awarenessas providing a foundation for love and compassion. In the introduction to hiscross-traditional anthology,

The Teachings of the Mystics

, Stace writes,

1 The term “mysticism” has been applied so broadly, covering such a range of individualsand traditions, that any generalizations concerning it are difficult. However, I believethat comparative mysticism is such an exciting area precisely because deep cross-tradi-tional similarities can be identified. For a complete account of and argument for a cross-traditional typology, see Wainwright 1983, chapter 1.2 Albert Schweitzer, Arthur Danto, R.C. Zaehner, and William Wainwright, along with Jeffery Kripal, have all raised objections to monistic (and, I assume, all nondualistic)mysticism.

[I]n the mystical consciousness all distinctions disappear and therefore thedistinction between ‘I’ and ‘You’ and ‘he’ and ‘she’. This is the mystical andmetaphysical basis of love, namely the realization that my brother and I are one, andthat therefore his sufferings are my sufferings and his happiness is my happiness.This reveals itself dimly in the psychological phenomena of sympathy and morepositively in actual love [Stace 1960b, 27].

While Stace’s perennialist conception of this foundation was visionary (if idealistic), the basic idea that love and hence morality is grounded innondualistic mystical consciousness was not new. In his 1937 “Mysticism andEthics in Hindu Thought,” written in response to Albert Schweitzer’s chargesthat Hindu monistic thought was essentially amoral, Radhakrishnan favorably quotes Dr. Paul Deussen on this exact point.

The Gospels quite correctly establish as the highest law of morality, ‘Love yourneighbour as yourselves’. But why should I do so since by the order of nature I feelpain and pleasure only in myself, not in my neighbour? The answer is not found inthe Bible but in the Veda, in the great formula That art Thou which gives in three words the combined sum of metaphysics and morals. You shall love your neighbourbecause you are your neighbour [quoted in Kripal 2002, 30–33].

This quote is suggestive of why Radhakrishnan has been criticized for reading into Indian mystical metaphysics a Western ethical theory that “simply isn’tthere” (see Kripal 2002, 30–31).Similarly, Stace’s perennialist foundationalism has received substantialcriticism for both its perennialism and foundationalism. His insistence thatall mystical experience can be neatly fit into a binary typology has beencriticized for neglecting significant differences between various mysticalexperiences, while his hypothesis that mystical experience serves as thefoundation for the moral sentiment via the mystics’ perceived dissolution of distinctions between themselves and others has been criticized as purely speculative (see Kripal 2002, 42).However, many mystics do talk of compassion, and for those who do wemust inquire about their view of the relation between this virtue and mysticalawareness. In this paper, I want to suggest that, within the writings of somenondualistic mystics, a case for a Stacean foundationalist hypothesis can bemade. I will briefly sketch readings of the views of Do¯gen Zenji (1200–1253)and Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) that render this contention plausible.

Then,I will suggest a conceptual model that attempts to elucidate how this grounding works. Briefly, I believe that many nondualistic mystics can be reasonably readas endorsing the following causal connection:

3 In an attempt to compensate for my lack of fluency with both Medieval German and Japanese, I have consulted and referenced various major translations of the works of bothEckhart and Do¯gen.

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

144

Enlightenment (that is, nondualistic mystical awareness) causally induces the perfectionof the virtue of compassion and loving-kindness within mystics, via extending the scope of their prudential concern for their own well-being to include the well-being of “others.”

Finally, utilizing this model, I shall suggest possible responses to two commonlines of reasoning for the claim that nondualistic mysticism is essentially amoral.2.

Do¯ gen’s Life of “Ceaseless Practice in the Buddha-mind”

First, let me briefly sketch Do¯gen’s concept of Ceaseless Practice (

Gyo¯ ji

), whichformed one of the central themes of his principle work, the

Sho¯ bo¯ genzo¯

(

The Treasury of the Eye of True Teaching

), a collection of essays primarily directedtowards the instruction of monks under his supervision. It is clear throughoutthe

Sho¯ bo¯ genzo¯

that the fostering of an extrovertive nondualistic mysticalawareness via the cultivation of a continuous attitude of nonattachment(

mujaku

) is at the heart of Ceaseless Practice. Consider the following excerpt,perhaps the most famous passage of the entire corpus, from the fascicle“

Genjo¯ ko¯ an

” (“the Actualization of the Fundamental Issue”).

Acting on and witnessing myriad things with the burden of oneself is ‘delusion’. Acting on and witnessing oneself in the advent of myriad things is enlightenment….To learn the Buddhist Way is to learn about oneself. To learn about oneself is toforget oneself. To forget oneself is to perceive oneself as all things. To realize this isto cast off body and mind of self and others. When you have reached this stage you will be detached even from enlightenment but will practice it continually withoutthinking [Nishiyama and Stevens 1975, I: 1].

A perception of an all-pervasive unity (“to perceive oneself as all things”) isclearly prominent here, but notice also the connection which Do¯gen emphasizesbetween this perception and action (“Acting on and witnessing oneself in theadvent of myriad things is enlightenment”). According to Do¯gen, enlightenedZen practitioners’ feelings and actions are altered in accord with this new perception of reality. Do¯gen is insisting that true realization of the pervasiveunity of Buddha-nature (

Bussho¯

) was accompanied by a fundamental shift inone’s actions and, in particular, one’s relations with others. But what does itmean to “practice enlightenment continually without thinking”?Throughout the

Sho¯ bo¯ genzo¯

, Do¯gen emphasizes that an entirely different way of being flows naturally from a perceived sense of the entire universe asdivine (for which Do¯gen had many names, including: Buddha-nature,Enlightenment, the Buddha-seal, the Body of the

Tathagatha

, and the Nature

D. Zelinski, From Prudence to Morality

145

of Things).

However, most pertinent for us is the sense of intimate

union withothers

which this enlightened perception provides (here expressed as “thedropping off of body and mind of self and others”). In another fascicle of the

Sho¯ bo¯ genzo¯

, “

Jippo¯

” (“the Entire Universe”), Do¯gen offers the following elaboration of this unity, “‘In the entire universe everything has self.’ Theentire universe is myself-as-it-is, myself as myself, yourself as myself, myself asyourself. Myself-is-yourself, yourself-is-myself and the entire universe form oneunity” (Nishiyama and Stevens 1975, I: 105).It is not difficult to envision that this altered perception would affect the way the Zen practitioner treats others, and this is exactly Do¯gen’s claim. Do¯geninsists that nonattachment—chiefly as cultivated in

zazen

meditation—and theperception of the pervasive unity of Buddha-nature which flows from it instill within one the four virtues of

Bodhisattvas

which revolve around compassion:

fuse

(“giving”),

aigo

(“loving words”),

rigyo¯

(“beneficial action”), and

do¯ ji

(“identification”). Consider Do¯gen’s explications, within the fascicle “

Bodaisattashisho¯ ho¯

” (“The Four Integrative Methods of Bodhisattvas”), of the first three of these:

Fuse

…is not to covet or be greedy…. [Regardless of the gift or receiver, it] is thesame as offering a flower that blooms in the far mountains to Buddha…. What isdifficult to transform is the mind of living beings; this giving is to intend, fromhaving put forth a single chattel and thus begun to transform the mind of living beings, to transform it even as far as attainment of enlightenment…there is a time when the mind transforms things, and there is giving which transforms the mind[Nishiyama and Stevens 1975, III: 124–25].

Aigo

means that whenever we see sentient beings, our compassion is arousednaturally and we use loving words. We cannot imagine using coarse speech…. Weshould realize that

aigo

comes from

aishin

[the mind of love] and that

aishin

is basedon compassion [Nishiyama and Stevens 1975, III: 126].

Rigyo¯

means that we take care of every kind of person, no matter whether of high orlow position, for this gives our life merit. We should think about people’s presentand future and about taking care of them that they will develop merit [Nishiyama and Stevens 1975, III: 127].

There is much going on in each of these passages, but I want to focus on thecompassion expressed in them. Where is this compassion coming from?Compassion is definitive of the

Bodhisattva

ideal, yet Do¯gen is not simply suggesting that we should emulate the ideal virtues of these exemplars of

4 Cook notes the view that “all things are Buddha” is a “consistent and persistent assertion”of Do¯gen’s (Cook 1989).5 This passage is especially interesting in that it indicates that a level of reflection andcognitive evaluation is called for, which is in strong contrast to the prevalent view withinZen scholarship that one who is enlightened has no need of “discriminatory thought” butacts spontaneously from “pure compassion” (see Whitehill 1987).

Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, 9. Band, 2007

146

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