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Mystical Languages of Unsaying by Michael A. Sells

Posted by Jess Austin Michalik, 1/11/05 at 5:12:27 PM.

This is quite possibly the best book on mysticism by a contemporary academic.  For anyone who has followed the Katz/Forman debate in the study of religious experience, Sells’ look at the logical structure of mystical texts is likely to come as a pleasant surprise.  Whereas other academics have focused on the question of whether or not there is an unconstructed moment of ‘pure consciousness’ available to the mystic, Sells rejects the category of experience altogether, and, instead of looking for what is ‘unconstructed’ and ‘beyond the text,’ looks at the texts to discover their structures.

What Sells discovers is that many of the most important mystical writers, from Plotinus to Eckhart, from Marguerite Porete to Ibn Arabi, utilize the same sort of dialectical logic in their writings.  This logic works to lead to aporia, or the breakdown of language.  For example, many mystics claim that God is ‘beyond language;’ traditionally academics have read this statement in a positivistic manner, as saying something about God as he really is.  For Sells, however, statements of this sort are intended as paradoxes which can bring about the ‘meaning event’ which is the ‘semantical analogue of the experience of mystical union.’

What this means is that looking for an experience beyond the mystical text is a mistake, because these texts are themselves designed to produce and construct experiences through their use of paradox.  For example, if an author says that God is ‘beyond language,’ she is saying something about God,––in language.  If he says that God is ‘beyond thought,’ he is still thinking something about God,––and therefore the statement that God is ‘beyond thought’ cannot be true, inasmuch as it purports to be a thought about God.

According to Sells these paradoxes brought about through dialectical logic operate in a fashion that he calls ‘disontological.’  The aim of these discourses and their use for the seeker of God is that they can bring about a sort of revolution in the mind.  The seeker, through study, reaches the limits of mind and logic, the place where language and logic fail.  By understanding these limits the seeker comes to know that he or she can never know ‘what really is’––all of one’s theories are infinitely distant from reality.  But through detaching from one’s own individual view of what is real, one becomes capable, in the language of this blog, of reflecting all things.

Sells’ book is the antidote to the works of perennialists and phenomenologists such as Underhill, Stace, and Forman.  Although these writers were well-meaning (and Forman and Underhill even made claims to the effect that they themselves were mystics also), nonetheless, flaws in their methodology prevented them from really looking at the philosophy and theology of those they studied.  The illuminating essays in Sells’ book, especially those on Marguerite Porete and John Scotus Eriugena, present the reader with a myriad of reasons for taking seriously the language and logic of the mystics and leaving the search for an ‘unconstructed experience’ aside.

Discuss