One thing Quakers are certain about is that they don’t have creeds, formal statements of faith that everyone needs to affirm. Doctrine or dogma are things Quakers reject. Despite this rejection, there are some beliefs which are widely held and assumed to be normative amongst Quakers. Although Quakers are non-creedal, they do have an informal orthodoxy. One of these widely held beliefs is that the religious traditions of the world are united by a mystical core. Beneath the surface level differences of the world religions is a uniting spiritual bedrock. Quakerism, in its rejection of outward religious symbols and its use of stillness and silence, is seen as an essentially mystical religion that tries to get as close to this bedrock as possible. Quakerism is often seen as akin to other traditions labelled as mystical, such as Vedanta Hinduism, Sufism, Kabbalah and Buddhist meditation. Quakerism’s focus on this mystical essence is thought to make the Quaker meeting a theologically inclusive space, holding different surface beliefs whilst worshippers are mystically united. In this blog post I’m going to trace the history of this idea and suggest its built on problematic foundations.
A history of the universal mystical experience
The way mysticism is understood by Quakers today didn’t emerge until the late 18th-century. Before this, the term “mystical theology” was used to describe particular habits of prayer and ways of interpreting the Bible within Christianity. The first people to be described as “mystics” where the 17th-century Quietists, a contemplative Christian movement in Spain, France and Italy. These “mystics” were seen as a fanatical sect within the Church, and “mystic” was often a pejorative term. By the mid-19th-century, this had changed significantly. In 1858, the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica replaced “mystics” with “mysticism,” describing it, not as a Christian sect, but as a kind of religious experience expressed across religious traditions whilst retaining a recognisable, unchanging core “whether they find expression in the Bagvat-Gita of the Hindu, or in the writings of Emmanuel Swedenborg”.[1] A major factor behind this shift in definition was the European “discovery” of Hinduism and Buddhism, with translations of Indian sacred texts being produced in Europe from the late 18th-century onwards. This encounter with religious difference beyond Islam and Judaism challenged notions of Christian superiority, and so the concept of mysticism was used to make sense of religious difference. During the 19th-century, the writings of New England Transcendentalists and Unitarians like Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) promoted the idea of mysticism as a universal spirituality that transcended any one specific tradition.
Early Liberal Quakers and mysticism
The late 19th-century saw a revival of interest in Christian mysticism in England. This revival made its first notable appearance in Quakerism in Caroline Stephen’s (1834-1909) popular book Quaker Strongholds (1891). Stephen saw the early Quakers as mystics, placing them alongside both the Quietists and those who were beginning to be included in the mystic fold, such as Thomas à Kempis and Theresa of Avila. For Stephen, Quakerism was a way to the mystical life, a mysticism that “may be found in all religions.”[2] This prepared the ground for Rufus Jones (1863-1948), the architect of Liberal Quakerism on both sides of the Atlantic with an untiring enthusiasm for mysticism. Whilst a student at Haverford College, Jones encountered the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which had a huge influence on his thinking. On visiting Emerson’s library, Jones discovered Emerson shared his love of the German Lutheran Jakob Boehme (1575-1624), and it was through immersing himself in Emerson’s essays and poetry that Jones came to his understanding of mysticism. With the assistance of Emerson, Jones discovered a mystical tradition which Quakerism was a part of. He saw Boehme as a forerunner of the Quaker faith, and Quakerism as the communal fruiting of the perennial mystical tradition with George Fox as its prophet.
William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)
Alongside Emerson, another crucial influence on Rufus Jones’ understanding of mysticism was the American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910), particularly his book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). For James, mysticism is at the root of individual religious experience and is present within various religious paths. He names four characteristics of mysticism: mystical experiences 1) cannot be expressed in words; 2) are states of deep knowing, of feeling more than thought; 3) are short lived; and 4) are passively experienced.[3] Rufus Jones came to count James as a personal friend and had a picture of James hanging on his Haverford office wall. James’ Varieties influenced not only Jones but liberal Quakers in general. This may be in part to James’ glowing references to Quakerism as “something which it is impossible to overpraise… So far as our Christian sects to-day are evolving into liberality, they are simply reverting in essence to the position which Fox and the early Quakers so long ago assumed.”[4]
Rufus Jones work on mysticism was part of wider revival of interest in Christian mysticism in England, including the works of William Ralph Inge (1860-1954) and Evelyn Underhill (1875-1941), whose Mysticism (1911) was extremely popular. Inge and Jones met and corresponded. Inge describes Quakers as “the mystical sect par excellence,”[5] and Quakerism as “now coming into its own as perhaps the purest form of Christianity.”[6] Jones and other members of the mysticism revival promoted an active “affirmation mysticism” that was world-affirming, communal and practical.[7] The ecstatic vision of union was not the end of the mystical path, but the beginning of active mission in the world.
Culture and religion
The modern understanding of mysticism rests on a clear distinction between the essential mystical experience accessible to all people, and the religious culture through which this experience is expressed and understood. Grace Jantzen has argued that this distinction between universal experience and particular expression can be traced back to German Idealist and Romantic philosophy and the work of German theologian F.D.E. Schleiermacher (1768-1834). On this view, outward religious difference belies an underlying, essential experience.[8] This distinction isn’t particularly clear in Rufus Jones’ writing on mysticism. Although he believed in an essential mystical experience, he also wanted to present Jesus as the most developed spiritual personality, and therefore Christianity as the most true religion. As liberal Quakers have moved in a Universalist direction through the 20th-centurty, this distinction becomes clearer. In his 1924 Swarthmore Lecture, Gerald Kenway Hibbert wrote that “every religious system has its ‘Quakers’ – those who turn from the outward and the legal and the institutional, and focus their attention on the Divine that is within.”[9] Howard H. Brinton wrote in 1957 that “silent worship has a powerful uniting influence in the deep unconscious regions of the soul… The feeling for that unity which exists in the depths when there is multiplicity at the surface is an experience shared by mystics of all religions.”[10] John Linton, in his 1977 lecture that sparked the beginnings of the Quaker Universalist Group, quotes Katharine Wilson: “Would it be true to say that Quakerism is not so much one specific sect of Christianity, or one specific religion, as the core that makes the centre of every religion?… It may be that Friends did not discover anything new at all but only what is at the heart of all religions if free from their cultural trappings.”[11] From my experience of Liberal Quakerism over the last two decades, this understanding of an universal mystical experience that transcends culture is pervasive, to the point of being a cornerstone of liberal Quaker theology.
The problems with universal mystical experience
As ubiquitous as this belief is among Liberal Quakers, there are substantial problems with this understanding of mysticism that I hope Friends can wrestle with.
Firstly, it isn’t possible to make a distinction between culture and experience. There is a history of thinking of culture as clothing we put on, of distinct and discrete cultures with firm boundaries between them, of culture that exists outside of us. However, this understanding of culture has been thoroughly picked apart and found inadequate. As long as I exist as a body in time and space, I can’t separate myself from culture. Culture is the sea we swim in, not something we can step outside of. Culture shapes our experience as much as experience shapes our culture. This means there is no essential mystical experience that transcends culture. Instead of being outside of culture, the idea of universal mystical experience is itself a cultural construction, an idea emerging in a particular time and place. The theory of a universal mystical experience is born from German Idealism and American Unitarianism in the context of Europe’s encounter with the religions of India. There is nothing universal about it.
Secondly, the idea of a universal mystical experience distorts our understanding of those we think of as “mystics.” There are few mystics who conform to William James’ description of mysticism. The idea that mystical experience can’t be communicated in words doesn’t match the experience of the medieval mystics like Julian of Norwich, who wrote voluminously about their experiences. The idea that mystical experience is more about feeling than the intellect would be absurd to Gregory of Nyssa and other mystics of the patristic period. When William James developed his theory of mysticism he didn’t always consult original sources, instead drawing on a collection of quotes compiled by a former student. His understanding of mysticism prevented him from taking the “mystics” on their own terms. Similarly, Rufus Jones only used extracts from Boehme’s writings that fit with his Jamesian definition of mysticism, and ignored what didn’t fit, such as Boehme’s esotericism. As Michael Birkel puts it, Jones “Quakerized Boehme… liberalized him… [and] Jonesified him, just as he Boehmefied George Fox.”[12] I see the same process at work in Jan Arriens words that “it is true that George Fox and the others had a good deal to say about Christ as Saviour and about the propitiation of sin, atonement and redemption, but I think this needs to be seen in the context of the time, when such thinking was deeply ingrained.”[13] The idea of universal mystical experience acts as a razor, cutting away anything too particular, like the specifics of Fox’s Christianity.
Thirdly, believing in a universal mystical experience deceptively works against us being a truly inclusive community. It may help us to feel inclusive, but I worry that it also feeds a sense of Quaker spiritual superiority. If Quakers have found, as Katharine Wilson said, what is at “the heart of all religions if free from their cultural trappings,” then this leads us to see “cultural trappings” as at best unnecessary, and at worst beneath us. Rufus Jones wrote disparagingly about the sacramental practices of other churches as “midway helps” that Quakers have moved beyond,[14] and on a trip to India in 1926 wrote in his diary that in India “religion is still in the doll stage.”[15] Harold Dowell has written that people who are not Universalists, who rely on things like the Bible, “are very reluctant to do away with their crutches.”[16] How can we enter humbly into interreligious dialogue when we already think we have access to the core of the other’s religion? There is much more to say about this final criticism, especially in how the idea of the universal mystical experience relates to colonialism and Whiteness, emerging as it did from Europe’s colonial encounter with, and construction of, the “mystic East.” I’ll be addressing these connections in a future blog post.
Mysticism is clearly an important part of Liberal Quakerism today and shouldn’t be abandoned. Quaker mysticism is its own thing, a particular kind of mysticism growing in a particular context, and it has great value. Rufus Jones’ “affirmation mysticism” was an important and life-giving development in Quaker spirituality and should be celebrated. But the Liberal Quaker belief in a universal mystical experience doesn’t serve us well. It’s a belief built on unstable foundations, presuming a universal knowledge we can’t possibly possess. Another way must be found to account for theological and religious difference, a way that begins with a humble encounter with difference rather than an assumption of similarity.
Further reading
- Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
- L. E. Schmidt, ‘The Making of Modern “Mysticism”’. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (1 June 2003): 273–302.
- Micael Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics (Brill, 2018)
- Stephen A. Kent, ‘Psychological and Mystical Interpretations of Early Quakerism: William James and Rufus Jones’. Religion 17, no. 3 (1987): 251–74.
Featured image photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash
[1] L. E. Schmidt, ‘The Making of Modern “Mysticism”’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (1 June 2003): 282.
[2] Caroline Emelia Stephen, Quaker Strongholds, Third edition (London: E. Hicks, 1891), 35.
[3] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, ed. Matthew Bradley, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 290–91.
[4] James, 15.
[5] William Ralph Inge, Mysticism in Religion (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1947), 17.
[6] Inge, 127.
[7] Michael Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, Brill Research Perspectives. Quaker Studies (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2018), 65–66.
[8] Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism, Cambridge Studies in Ideology and Religion 8 (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 313.
[9] Gerald Kenway Hibbert, The Inner Light and Modern Thought (London: The Swarthmore Press Ltd., 1924), 24-25.
[10] Howard H. Brinton, Quakerism and Other Religions (Wallingford, PA: Pendle Hill, 1957), 7–8.
[11] John Linton, ‘Quakerism as Forerunner’, in The Quaker Universalist Reader, Number 1: A Collection of Essays, Addresses and Lectures (West Chester, PA: Quaker Universalist Fellowship, 1986), 12.
[12] Birkel, Quakers Reading Mystics, 73. A similar criticism can be found in Daniel E Bassuk, ‘Rufus Jones and Mysticism’, Quaker Religious Thought 46 (1978): 21.
[13] Jan Arriens, The Place of Jesus in Quaker Universalism, Quaker Universalist Group Pamphlets 17 (Glen Parva, Leicester: The Quaker Universalist Group, 1990), 5.
[14] Rufus Matthew Jones, The Faith and Practice of the Quakers (Richmond, Ind: Friends United Press, 1980), 65.
[15] Matthew S. Hedstron, ‘Rufus Jones and Mysticism for the Masses’, Cross Currents 54, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 42.
[16] Harold Dowell, Christianity in an Evolutionary Perspective, Quaker Universalist Group Pamphlets 18 (Glen Parva, Leicester: The Quaker Universalist Group, 1990), 20–21.
Jolly Quaker 
You have good challenges to those who would complicate (from their own perspective) the experience of mysticism.
I have read/heard Quakers described as “everyday mystics.” I like that. When I ask myself “who could use my help right now?” and wait for an answer, I have left intellect behind and have prepared myself to be a servant of what is revealed. That’s how I understand everyday mysticism.
Tony DiMello on an old VHS videotape of an even older TV appearance (he was still in black priest clothes) described our mystical relationship with the divine as a CB radio conversation. You push the button on the Mic and talk. Then you let go of the button and you listen.
What I let go of that button and listen, what comes back to me is from a place beyond words, has an authenticity that needs no proof, and often surprises. That feels pretty mystical to me.
Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment.
Thank you for this, Mark. It’s a stimulating piece.
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You’re welcome Brian. Thanks for reading! 🙂
RE my point (4) I should clarify that I’d be happy to hear your views on whether there could be a coherent Christian mystical experience of god across time and wildly differing cultural contexts. i.e. could Julian of Norwich, George Fox and you and I have the same relation to God? Or are we trapped by our time and space and bullshit ourselves if we pretend otherwise?
Hi Nick, thanks so much for reading the blog and taking the time to post such thoughtful comments. Here’s my attempt at a response.
1 & 3) Yes, I think you’re right that the belief in universal mystical experience is found in various groups. As the belief arose in the context of Europe encountering greater religious difference, it has become a common pretext for interfaith dialogue. Your mention of India and hippy culture is really important, and the “part 2” of this blog post will look at the role of the “mystic East” in this conversation. Europeans have been looking to the spirituality of India for over two centuries, and I see hippy culture as part of that tradition. The idea of universal mystic experience arose in the midst of the European-India colonial encounter, with groups like the Brahmo Samaj forming in the early 19th-century to promote a reformed, monotheistic and Unitarian form of Hinduism, so India is a vital part of the picture.
2) I wouldn’t say Quakers today follow William James wholesale – James also included psychedelic experiences in his understanding of mysticism, something Rufus Jones did not like! – but I’ve found the idea that any words are ultimately inadequate to describe mystical experience, and that mystical experience is felt more than thought, are fairly common beliefs amongst Friends. I think this is why we have such a long list of words as a community – no one word can suffice – and why theology remains something of a taboo. Like you, I don’t find James’ description of mystical experience compelling!
4) Thanks for asking about God. 😊 My theology contains some universals. I believe God is the creator of the universe, and that God’s Spirit infuses and sustains all things. This sense of God’s nearness is also coupled with God’s transcendence, with God’s strangeness. I believe we only ever experience God “through a glass darkly,” God is always mediated to us through culture. I can swim about in the sea of culture, learn a new language, live in a different country, inhabit a new landscape, but I can never step out of culture on to dry land. This is why the Incarnation is such an important Christian teaching for me. The idea that God is revealed in Jesus says that God communicates with us through material reality. When the Universalists accuse Christianity of being too “parochial,” my response is “that’s the point!” Jesus was a fleshy human being in a particular time and place. God is with us through the particular fleshy messiness we find ourselves in. My theology is shaped by liberation theology, which continually stresses the need for theologians to pay attention to their context. Black theologian Dwight Hopkins says that “theology is biography.” I hope that through my spiritual practice God can broaden my horizon and refine my humility, but I’ll never stop being me.
I love the part of the Jesus story where the disciples are told the Risen Christ has already gone ahead of them. They need to catch him up. He’s already somewhere they’re yet to arrive at. There’s something strange and ungraspable about Jesus. So, when I encounter people with different religious beliefs, my hope is that I will encounter this strange Christ in them, the Christ who I known something of, but who is also deeply mysterious. I can’t assume that the stranger shares my experience. That’s something I can only discover through dialogue and deep sharing.
Is there a coherent Christian mystical experience through time? In one sense, yes, because God is One and is the God who was, is and is to come. In another sense, no, as there are multiple ways of being Christian, multiple Christianities, and because I believe that culture shapes experience, different Christian cultures will produce different experiences. When reading Julian of Norwich, we can take comfort from her words that “all shall be well,” but we should also take seriously her visions of the crucified Christ. It’s important to engage with the differences as well as the similarities to our own experience. I also think that what different Christians include under the term “mysticism” can vary wildly. I think Quakers generally talk of mysticism in the way that Christians in other churches would talk about prayer.
I hope this helps clarify some things. Thanks again for engaging with the blog post Nick. I really appreciate it!
Hi Mark,
Thanks for this, its interesting & thought-provoking – I’ve read it five times now! But I have a few responses/challenges, I’d love to hear your views:
1) the concept of universal mystical experience is also emphasised in other religions/cultures. its definitely not a Quaker thing per se. i lived and worked in India and found it a fairly commonplace idea there. it also seems to be widely expressed amongst interfaith circles in the UK, though perhaps that reflects a similar culture amongst the interfaith people…
2) I don’t agree with you that there is a widespread & specifically Quaker understanding of mysticism, based on William James’ principles. Personally, i don’t find his definition or the 4 principles you quote to be accurate or compelling. In particular, i feel modern Quakers are keen to communicate/discuss/reflect on mystical experience. otherwise why bother going to Quaker meeting?
3) Your blog post doesn’t reference hippies. i think thats a big omission. Hippy culture drove an idea that mystical experiences could be universal & easily accesed outside of a religious context. that had a massive impact across western culture, including Quakers. some of this is still playing out now, hence ‘mindfullness’ and ‘curated psychedelic experiences’ being in vogue. i think it really important to speak to the dangers of short-cut, individualised, consumerist mysticism and why long-term practice within religious community matters. but i reckon that Jim Morrisson singing Break On Through to the Other Side is a much better starting point than William James!
4) Where’s God in this? your blog doesn’t speak directly about this. I do tend to agree with your point that we can’t escape from our cultural context. But I always come back to the sense that God is universal & transcendent of our particular circumstance. i believe that mysticism connects to that. when i centre down in prayer and worship i am searching to connect with divinity beyond the limitations of my current space and time. That’s the basis of my (very limited!) theology and how i understand the informal orthodoxy amongst Quakers which you are discussing. Do you think I’m bullshitting myself? (genuine question, coz at other times i think you advocate for an understanding of god as universal)
really interested in your views, thanks again for the faith & service which you put into your writings…
finally, please excuse any typos – writing on my phone. sending love to you and all readers x
Thanks for your thought through post, and for showing how these ideas grew.
Thanks for reading Leonora!
I’m [more] interested in your thoughts here about universalists rather than mystics. It seems to me that there are two kinds of universalism; in the first participants essentially reject their own religious identity and heritage in the hope that there is some uniting ‘thing’ that can be found in all/many religious faiths – kind of stripping away all the unnecessary stuff and focusing on the essence of religion. The second appears to me to be to go deeper into one’s own tradition whilst in some sense acknowledging that there will be a meeting of others in other faiths doing the same thing. The first seems to say that 90%+ of (in the context of this discussion) Christianity is unnecessary and can be cut out altogether. Tbh I’m not totally clear what the second is saying..
Thanks for reading and commenting Joe. Yes, I think you’re right about the two kinds of universalism. The first kind of universalism you describe is often called “pluralism” by academic theologians, to distinguish it from, say, “Christian universalism” which is the belief within Christianity that non-Christians will be saved. Both are ways to try and understand religious difference without dismissing it. I think the second position is more successful at this than the first.
I think what the second (deeper in one’s tradition) perspective is saying is that the divine is, by definition, larger than any one perspective we, the non-divine, can imagine. Hans Kung’s Tracing The Way is a good place to start. Fair warning: I found it a dense read, 4 to 5 pages until my “overload” light started flashing.
At the Quaker meeting I attend (near Melbourne, Australia) the members have a variety of theologies and some have no theology. For example, we talk about ‘The Light’ and describe it variously as ‘spirit’ or ‘conscience’.
In meeting, this diversity generates ministry that I think most of us find worthwhile and sometimes significant. There’s clearly something holding us together during the silence. I don’t know what this ‘something’ is.
The structure and tradition of the meeting for worship may have something to do with it.
The meeting seems to me to be an honest response to the need for companionship in the face of eternity and the unknowable.
In your article, you point to the dangers – and perhaps errors – of assuming a common spiritual basis to all religion. I think it’s clear that there’s a variety of spiritual understanding among Quakers.
So perhaps Quaker spirituality can be seen as something for each member to approach in their own way; that’s given room to exist and develop by the framework and tradition of Quaker practise, and encouraged by our shared concern with the eternal and the unknowable.
Hi Alan, thanks for reading my blog and taking the time to comment. Your description of Quaker spirituality is one that I suspect many liberal Quakers would agree with. I think what you’re describing is what theologians call “pluralism” which is closely related to the idea of a universal mystical experience. Pluralism is a response to a religiously diverse world, attempting to give some common framework within which all religious positions can be understood. Everyone sharing a universal mystical experience is one framework. The parable of the blind men and the elephant is another. The framework you describe is ‘the eternal and unknowable’ in which Quakers share a concern.
I have a number of problems with these pluralistic frameworks, some of which are similar to my problems with universal mystical experience. My main problem with pluralism is that these frameworks exclude me. As a Christian Quaker, although I believe there is a mystery to God that I will never fathom, I also believe God is knowable to some degree. Jesus shows us what God is like, and so there are definite statements that can be made about God – God is love, God is a God of peace and justice, God is concerned with ‘the least of these’ etc. It’s important for me to be in a community that shares this understanding, and so I struggle to unite around ‘the unknowable’ because that doesn’t capture who I find God to be. The God/divine/eternal at the heart of pluralism must remain unknowable in order to accommodate so many diverse theologies/non-theologies. Nothing can be said about this God with certainty, and so a community that gathers around such a God can only ever be an agnostic one. For me, this is ultimately an unsatisfying theology that I don’t find to be life-giving. I think it’s also a position that struggles to connect with the Quaker tradition historically. I don’t think George Fox makes sense in an agnostic, pluralistic framework.
I recognise that for many liberal Quakers, pluralism is a theology of freedom. Pluralism allows for a great variety of individual theologies where no one need feel restricted by the theologies of others. My challenge to such Friends is that pluralism is an exclusive position that only includes pluralists, and pluralism makes it incredibly difficult to say what we are doing together in worship. Within pluralism we cannot expect anyone else to share our individual theological position. For some Quakers this is not a problem, but for others like me it can make the Quaker community a very lonely place.
Thanks again for reading and commenting. I really appreciate people engaging with my blog, especially when we are coming from different theological places.
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I’m not sure I believe that God is mediated through culture. I think it is unfathomable, and “mystic” or direct experience with God is completely beyond our ability to assess. Human culture may sometimes color our experience of it, but I believe that we can experience the divine completely unfiltered if we are given the chance (we are not the subjects here). To think otherwise feels a bit hubristic. As you noted, our descriptions of our experiences may be affected by culture, but that does not mean the experience itself is. To claim to know with certainty that any one person’s personal “mystical” experience is culturally influenced doesn’t feel any more likely than being able ton describe certainly and completely what god is (it’s just unfathomable).
Seeing god through a “mirror dimly/glass darkly” doesn’t mean that that obstruction is necessarily culture, though culture may be one factor among others. The obstruction is us, and the direct experience is moving the individual parts of ourselves out of the way to be able to get a slightly clearer view.
I don’t think the culture argument is bad necessarily, but it does feel like an over-intellectualization. It is also, as another reader said, a stimulating topic and an interesting one!
Thanks for writing it!
Thanks for reading my blog Kenneth, and for taking the time to leave a comment.
I too believe that God is ultimately unfathomable, which is why I believe God is always mediated by culture.
I should say the definition of culture I’m working with is how we make sense of our lives. So culture as I understand it is all consuming – it’s our language, our symbols, our histories, our relationships, our values etc. – rather than something we can separate out from other parts of our self. There is no part of us untouched by culture.
It’s interesting that you find the idea that our experience of God is always mediated by culture to be hubristic, because I think the opposite. Imagining a stained-glass window, if God is the sunlight and culture is the window, then we only have access to the patterns refracted through the coloured glass. We don’t have direct access to the sun itself, and so there will always be more to God than we can experience. So I’d see a claim to direct access as hubristic.
I guess God could bypass our culture to give us direct experience – I don’t want to put limits on what God can do – but I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed that kind of direct knowledge. I think it’s we who are limited, not God.
And even then, if someone is claiming an experience of God unmediated by culture, the only way they can communicate that experience to me, or even make sense of it for themselves, is through culture.
I also don’t know how we could experience God unmediated by culture. Even ‘experience’ is something we have as embodied creatures. And as bodies we are enmeshed in time and place, in culture. What would it mean to have an ‘experience’ without our bodies? So, for me, a claim to unmediated experience of God also diminishes the importance of our bodies.
As someone who works within a Christian framework, the fact that God is mediated to us through culture is seen as a good thing. If God is revealed in Jesus then God is revealed through a particular culture in a particular time and place. God’s mediated through culture is an affirmation of the goodness of our bodies.
Within Christian theology there is the hope of the beatific vision, that one day we will see God face to face, but that is thought to only be possible at the resurrection of the dead when we have new bodies which can look upon God and not be destroyed. And that whole scenario is completely beyond my imagining. So I think that, in this life, experience mediated through culture, through our particular bodies in a particular time and place, is the only option we have.
Thanks again for engaging with my work!
Thanks for this, Mark. I appreciate your article, but disagree fairly profoundly.
It all depends how far upstream you go. The deepest mystical experience isn’t culture-bound. It really is inexpressible in words, although words have to be used if we wish to do our best to express it. In our Quaker Meeting I find myself using all kinds of terminology including Christian, Buddhist and Sufi, depending on what comes to me in the moment and best expresses what I feel moved to say.
These traditions are all trying to point to or describe the deepest reality, but the map is not the territory: the words are not the experience, and the experience is beyond words! The artist uses the medium to hand: Meister Eckhart necessarily used Christian terminology, as did George Fox. Here is a lovely example of mystical expression which doesn’t seem culture-bound at all, apart from the use of the word ‘God’:
“And in this emptiness of spirit we receive the Incomprehensible Light, Which enfolds and penetrates us as air is penetrated by the light of the sun; And this Light is nought else but a fathomless gazing and seeing. What we are, that we gaze at; and what we gaze at, that we are. For our thought, our life, our being, are lifted up in simplicity, and united with the Truth, that is God. Therefore in this simple gazing we are one life and one spirit with God” – The Blessed John of Ruysbroeck (1293 – 1381)
and here is one of my favourite Sufi quotes:
“Know that when you learn to lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other secret to be learnt, and more than this is not known to me.” – Ansari of Herat
Thanks for this, Mark. I appreciate your article, but disagree fairly profoundly.
It all depends how far upstream you go. The deepest mystical experience isn’t culture-bound. It really is inexpressible in words, although words have to be used if we wish to do our best to express it. In our Quaker Meeting I find myself using all kinds of terminology including Christian, Buddhist and Sufi, depending on what comes to me in the moment and best expresses what I feel moved to say.
These traditions are all trying to point to or describe the deepest reality, but the map is not the territory: the words are not the experience, and the experience is beyond words! The artist uses the medium to hand: Meister Eckhart necessarily used Christian terminology, as did George Fox. Here is a lovely example of mystical expression which doesn’t seem culture-bound at all, apart from the use of the word ‘God’:
“And in this emptiness of spirit we receive the Incomprehensible Light, Which enfolds and penetrates us as air is penetrated by the light of the sun; And this Light is nought else but a fathomless gazing and seeing. What we are, that we gaze at; and what we gaze at, that we are. For our thought, our life, our being, are lifted up in simplicity, and united with the Truth, that is God. Therefore in this simple gazing we are one life and one spirit with God” – The Blessed John of Ruysbroeck (1293 – 1381)
and here is one of my favourite Sufi quotes:
“Know that when you learn to lose yourself, you will reach the Beloved. There is no other secret to be learnt, and more than this is not known to me.” – Ansari of Herat
Thanks so much for reading my blog and taking the time to leave a comment. As you say, we are in disagreement on this topic. One of my difficulties with your perspective is how it diminishes many of the claims of Christianity, including claims which people like Eckhart, Fox and Ruysbroeck believed. A key claim within Christianity is that God took on flesh in 1st century Palestine, but I think this claim is diminished by a belief that Jesus’s flesh is map and not territory. I think an emphasis on a mystical experience which transcends specific religious traditions requires us to read figures like Fox and Eckhart selectively, and therefore misread them. I think there are resonances between mystics, but I wouldn’t go beyond that. I believe we are always culture-bound, including in our religious experience, just as God bound Godself to culture in Jesus.
Thanks again for thoughtfully sharing your perspective and engaging with my writing, even if we disagree. I appreciate it.
I understand the centrality of Jesus within Christianity, but the mystical dimension is surely what is referred to as ‘Christ Consciousness’. This seems to parallel the ‘Unborn Buddha Mind’ of Buddhists, ‘The Beloved’ of the Sufis, and ‘Atman is Brahman’ of Advaita Vedanta.
So I stick to my guns: upstream of all the conditioned, culture-bound formulations that we come out with, lies unbounded universal consciousness, beyond the reach of the rational and discursive mind. No words are needed to qualify this – it is a seeing of our essential nature. John Elford (for some reason I’m coming up as ‘totnesnd’ – now there’s a clue: the name must come from an online non-duality group I was involved in some years ago)