The study of mysticism

What it is

There is an academic field devoted to mystical experience. It sits across religious studies, philosophy, history, anthropology and increasingly cognitive science, and it operates under a working rule called methodological agnosticism: describe, contextualise and analyse the phenomena, while bracketing the question of whether the mystic met anything.

This is not fence-sitting, and it is worth understanding why. A historian of medieval Christian mysticism does not need to know whether Julian of Norwich encountered Christ in order to establish what she wrote, what tradition she wrote within, how her text was transmitted, how her theology differs from her contemporaries', and what her visions meant inside her own world. Bracketing the truth question is what makes that work possible for believer and atheist alike.

It is also, more or less, the rule this site runs on.

Where it came from

William James made the subject academically respectable with The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), treating first-person accounts as data.

Evelyn Underhill's Mysticism (1911) mapped the Western contemplative tradition systematically and became the standard work for a generation. She wrote from inside the subject rather than outside it, which was then normal and later became suspect.

Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (1917) gave the field one of its most durable concepts: the numinous, the encounter with the wholly other, which he characterised as mysterium tremendum et fascinans — a mystery that is simultaneously terrifying and compelling. Otto's insistence that the religious response is sui generis, not reducible to ethics or emotion, still shapes the discussion.

Then came the arguments that made the field self-conscious. Stace and Katz fought out perennialism against constructivism. Bernard McGinn began his multi-volume history of Western Christian mysticism, insisting the subject be treated historically rather than as a timeless essence.

And then the field turned on its own central term.

Michel de Certeau argued that "mysticism" as a distinct category is an early modern invention — that la mystique emerged as a noun in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, naming a newly separated domain of interior experience at precisely the moment when religion was losing its grip on public life. On this account the category is not a neutral description of something perennial but an artefact of a specific European crisis.

Grace Jantzen pressed the point politically in Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (1995), arguing that defining mysticism as private, ineffable inner experience was not innocent. It was a construction that removed mystics — disproportionately women, who had used mystical authority to speak when no other authority was available to them — from the sphere of public and institutional power. Make it ineffable and interior, and it can no longer challenge anyone.

How it is used

The field's tools are what allow comparison without collapse: describing a tradition in its own vocabulary before reaching for a cross-tradition category, distinguishing the experience from the report from the later interpretation, attending to who had institutional permission to have experiences and who did not.

A more recent strand, sometimes called contemplative science, studies practitioners empirically — neuroimaging of long-term meditators, psychometrics of altered states, psilocybin trials. It has produced real findings and inherits the field's oldest problem: what it measures is the state, and the state was never the disputed part.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the field is genuine, substantial and methodologically careful, and that most popular writing on mysticism proceeds as though none of it existed.

We can say the category problem is serious rather than a fashionable quibble. "Mysticism" groups Teresa of Ávila, Ibn ʿArabī, Śaṅkara and Dōgen under one heading none of them would have recognised, using a term that acquired its modern meaning in early modern Europe. That does not make comparison impossible, but it does mean the category is a tool we are bringing, not a joint in nature we are carving at.

We can say methodological agnosticism has critics on both flanks, and both have a point. Believers argue that bracketing the truth question permanently is a way of quietly answering it — study a thing forever as a human phenomenon and you have implied it is only that. Sceptics argue the opposite: that respectful bracketing lends unearned credibility. The field mostly carries on regardless, which is probably right, but the objections are not silly.

What we cannot do is pretend that studying this material from outside is a neutral act. Every choice — what counts as mysticism, whose accounts survive, which traditions get compared with which — carries assumptions. The best the field manages, and the best this site will manage, is to make those choices visible rather than invisible.

Further reading

• William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) — still the entry point.
• Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (1917) — for the numinous.
• Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God (multi-volume, 1991–) — the standard historical treatment of the Western Christian tradition.
• Grace Jantzen, Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (1995) — the critique that makes the category itself the object of study.