Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism.

Every now and again our philosophy department will have a speaker who will read a paper on the subject of mysticism and its putative truth claims. My impression has been that many of these philosophical discussions float in an ethereal and abstract world free from the anchorhold of actual texts, historical discrimination, and theological context. That impression of mine has also struck Grace Jantzen, philosopher of religion. Jantzen makes a sustained argument that one must not only understand Christian mysticism in terms of historical context but, and this is the burden of her work, a serious investigation of gender will greatly change how one views mystical experience.

Jantzen's real targets, set out vigorously in her first chapter and taken up toward the end of her book, are the heirs of William James's understanding of mysticism as an intense subjective experience that is primarily ineffable. By contrast, Jantzen follows the lead of social theorists like Luckmann/Berger and Foucault, seeing mysticism as the "social construction of reality." "What counts as mysticism will reflect (and also help to constitute) the institutions of power in which it occurs," Jantzen writes. Next to those words, in the margin, I wrote: "only?" Well, maybe not. Still, one thing Jantzen does not tolerate is any analysis of mysticism focusing on the private and subjective.

Jantzen is an autodidact when it comes to history. The large middle section of her work is deeply historical in its attempt to show that the mystical experience of women is gender specific and frequently suspect. Direct experience of the divine grants power, and when women were involved, a patriarchal, misogynistic, and power-greedy institution sometimes resorted to suppression. To each of these assertions one can adduce many compelling proofs, but to allow this perspective to be the exclusive lens through which to read the tradition brings its own distortions.

Jantzen presents these historical chapters as a "counter tradition" to show the weakness of the analyses of many philosophers of religion. Bernard McGinn's still unfinished history of mysticism (the first two volumes were reviewed in these notes) has, in my estimation, avoided the impasse of the philosophers thanks to both his theory of what counts for a "mystical" text and to his ability to read mystical texts without being reductionistic. Even the "bad" Bernard McGinn (as he calls himself when he is criticized for not providing enough social context of the sort Jantzen uses) does possess the conspicuous merits of reading texts carefully, making useful distinctions, and not indulging in sweeping generalizations.

Jantzen, more ideologically driven, is not always so careful. I cite only one example: Jantzen notes, rightly, that the "mystical" sense of Scripture lies hidden under the literal sense of Scripture. This understanding goes all the way back to Origen. The mystical sense was similarly employed with regard to the Eucharist and later the church itself to illuminate what was hidden in the bread/wine of the altar or behind the facade of the church as institution. Jantzen argues that the act/practice of reading in the service of mysticism was largely a male enterprise, because males constituted the literate class. But the plain fact of the matter is that contemplative lectio had very little to do with advanced literacy and very much to do with the memorization and rumination on texts. Anyone who could memorize a psalm or a Pater would engage in lectio. The mystical reading of texts for someone like Origen was emphatically not a matter of exegesis nor was it connected with initiation into mystery cults (an assertion Jantzen makes more than once) or the like. It was something that anyone could do, as the example of the early desert ascetics and contemporary Orthodox practice of the "Jesus Prayer" make plain.

Jantzen's historical chapters call out frequently for correction. Furthermore, while I agree that male and female religious/mystical experiences were quite different (a banality when one thinks about it), they are not so widely riven as she would have us think. Happily, her final two chapters on ineffability and the future of mysticism are far more restrained, better argued, and quite illuminating. Indeed, I applaud her sensible analysis of how most philosophers of religion get it wrong when they think of mysticism's purported ineffability as subjective experience rather than the experience of the ineffability of God. When seen clearly, one understands that mystical language is an attempt to describe the loving encounter with the Divine. John of the Cross's poetry (saturated in the language of the Song of Songs) was not about his experience but about what (or better, Whom) he had experienced.

In the final analysis, Jantsen is deeply ambivalent about how one defines mysticism in any fundamental sense. This skepticism derives from her dissatisfaction with philosophers who attempt to offer such definitions and her tendency to concentrate on first-person accounts of experience. Bernard McGinn, it seems to me, has avoided both of these problems, and has, from a theological point of view, broken the impasse. Jantzen, it strikes me, is entangled in old quarrels even though her vocabulary is contemporary.