Consciousness, Divine Presence, and the Mystic Philosopher
A study of this critical period of the Ecumenic Age will have to face the fact that what happened is the location of the process of differentiation in the mind of man. Once consciousness or, in the Greek terminology, the psyche of man is understood as the site of the process, the symbolization of divine presence must shift from the intracosmic gods to the psyche of man as the site of divine presence, with the most radical expression of the experience in the Christian symbol of Incarnation.
When consciousness becomes luminous for itself as the site of divine-human cooperation in the historical process of differentiation, the end of all things has by no means come, as some of the contemporaries of this great event believed. The Second Coming that would abolish the structure of this world has not happened, although it was expected by Paul and the early Christians in the near future. Instead, something entirely different happened. The symbols that expressed the experiences of the psyche, of its consciousness, of its noetic and pneumatic structure, were recognized as symbolizations of truth emerging in the process of history, which in one part is a process in this world, while in another part it is a theophanic process. Symbols at large move into the position of a secondary realization of insight; beyond this secondary insight there arises an understanding of man’s tension toward the divine ground that cannot be adequately expressed by any symbolization of truth in this world. This further articulation of a stratum of experience beyond the symbolization of noetic and pneumatic divine presence is what, after Pseudo-Dionysius, came to be called mysticism. This stratum, of course, is present also before it becomes articulate in the neo-Platonically influenced Christian thinkers of the fifth century. Even Plato has a clear knowledge of relations to a divine reality that lies beyond the revelation expressed by his symbols of a Demiurge, or of the Nous as the third god following Kronos and Zeus in history. Mysticism, understood as the awareness of a stratum in reality that lies structurally beyond the reality of historical theophanies, even of the theophany in Christ, can be discerned in inchoate form through history as far back as we have literary records. The striking parallels between Western and Hindu mysticism, for instance, have been studied by Rudolf Otto in his Mysticism East and West [1932].
Mysticism has become of considerable importance in Western history ever since the Middle Ages, when the limits of doctrinal expression of truth became visible, especially through the work of Thomas Aquinas. In the generation after Aquinas begins the split of theologizing between the nominalism of William of Ockham and the mysticism of Meister Eckhart. Nominalist and mystical faith have remained ever since two important strands in Western intellectual history. The nominalism of a dogma that has separated from experience, and therefore can no longer be controlled by recourse to experience, has become the publicly dominant form of the West because it was, beginning with the eighteenth century, adopted as the intellectual form of ideologizing. In this situation, when the various doctrinal verities begin to fight one another, mysticism becomes again and again the concern of philosophers. In the sixteenth century, when there were eight religious civil wars in France, Jean Bodin recognized that the struggle between the various theological truths on the battlefield could be appeased only by understanding the secondary importance of doctrinal truth in relation to mystical insight. He wanted his sovereign, the king of France, to be, if not a mystic, at least advised by a mystic like himself in order to stand above the dogmatomachy. My careful study of the work of Bodin in the early thirties gave me my first full understanding of the function of mysticism in a time of social disorder. I still remember Bodin’s Lettre à Jean Bautru as one of the most important documents to affect my own thought.1 In the twentieth century, when the dogmatomachy is no longer that of theological but of ideological sects, a similar understanding of the problem has again been reached by Henri Bergson in his Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion. I doubt that Bergson has the same stature as a mystic as Bodin, but these two French spiritualists are for me the representative figures for the understanding of order in times of spiritual disorder.
1. See CW, vol. 23, chap. 6, §4, “The Letter to Jean Bautru.”