Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

<div><b>Michael Kessler</b> has taught at Purdue University and the University of Chicago. <br><br><b>Christian Sheppard</b> is a lecturer in the Basic Program at the University of Chicago.</div>

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When we speak of mystics, we normally think of people who have confessed extraordinary experiences of divine presence. But mysticism can also refer to the ways that people have described and explained such phenomena--ways that challenge our normal modes of thinking and believing. And the study of mystics can show problems inherent to experience and language--how to speak and think about what affects people but lies beyond language or thought.

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Mystics

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Preface MICHAEL KESSLER AND CHRISTIAN SHEPPARD......................................................................................viiIntroduction: What Do We Mean by "Mystic"? JEAN-LUC MARION..........................................................................1"Suddenly, Christ": The Place of Negative Theology in the Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagites ALEXANDER GOLITZIN.....................8Thomas Aquinas and Onto-theo-logy JEAN-LUC MARION...................................................................................38Between Mysticisms: The Trial of Joan of Arc FRANOISE MELTZER......................................................................75Unitrinum Seu Triunum: Nicholas of Cusa's Trinitarian Mysticism BERNARD McGINN......................................................90Unmasking the Angel of Light: The Problem of Deception in Martin Luther and Teresa of Avila SUSAN SCHREINER.........................118From Ritual to Poetry: Herbert's Mystical Eucharist REGINA M. SCHWARTZ..............................................................138Mysticism and Catastrophe in Georges Bataille's Atheological Summa AMY HOLLYWOOD....................................................161"The Experience of Nonexperience" KEVIN HART........................................................................................188Locating the Mystical Subject THOMAS A. CARLSON.....................................................................................207Afterword: A Reflection on Mystics: Presence and Aporia DAVID TRACY.................................................................239List of Contributors.................................................................................................................245Index................................................................................................................................247

Chapter One

ALEXANDER GOLITZIN

I should begin with a caveat: I represent a minority in Dionysian scholarship. In fact, I stand at the very terminus of a series of progressively shrinking minorities. To shift to an arboreal image, the great trunk of Dionysian studies over the past century has been devoted to my subject's undoubted debt to late Neoplatonism, in which tradition our topic in this volume, apophatic theology, plays a considerable role. A sturdy branch of the scholarly literature does seek to take into account Dionysius's equally undoubted efforts-hence the first-century pseudonym of a disciple of Saint Paul-to supply at least the appearance of a Christian background. Narrower is the offshoot that tries to read him against the setting of specifically Eastern Christian thought, and perilously thin the branch from that branch that has sought to apply to this mysterious, late-fifth- or early-sixth-century writer insights from that Christian Syria that, everyone agrees, represents his at least geographical point of origin. Thinnest of all, really the merest twig at the end of all of these branchings, is my argument, which proposes that the Eastern and especially Syrian ascetico-mystical tradition offers us a kind of royal path to the comprehension of the Areopagitica as a coherent and even emphatically Christian vision. The setting of Syrian monasticism in particular, with its roots extending back into those native traditions of Christian Syria that include the wandering ascetical visionaries known to us, for example, from the gospel and the Acts of Judas Thomas and, more distantly still-though this is more speculative-into the vision tradition of apocalyptic literature deriving from Christianity's original matrix in Second Temple Judaism, is, I submit, the Sitz im Leben of the Corpus Dionysiacum.

I admit that I am quite alone in this view. I am also alone in arguing, elsewhere at greater length than here, that Dionysius's more specific context is the conflict or, at least, tension between the figures of the ascetic holy man and the bishop or, more elaborately, between the personal authority of the monastic visionary, peculiarly beloved by the laity of the Syrian Church, and the ecclesiastical, sacramental thrust of Christian worship and polity. This tension, and sometimes conflict, was several generations old by the time our author set his quill to parchment. It had also elicited an equally venerable and distinctive set of replies from within the ascetic tradition itself, replies from which I believe Dionysius drew, especially in his treatises on, and invention of the word, hierarchy, to which I shall return below.

For now, though, any ecclesial or, indeed, obviously Christian element is not immediately obvious in the Mystical Theology, the little treatise that is perhaps the most famous and influential of the Dionysian corpus. True, it begins with a prayer offered to the Christian Trinity and goes on to invoke the biblical account of Moses ascending into the cloud atop Mount Sinai as an image of the mind's ascent into the darkness, gnophos, and silence, sige, of divinity. The remaining four chapters, however, are devoted to a discussion of negation, apophasis, which appears to be largely devoid of any ostensibly Christian elements. As God descends into the world, creating and sustaining it, Dionysius explains in chapter 3, so he acquires many names, from Trinity and Unity at the highest stage to all the attributes of human emotions, bodily form, and even to the names of inanimate creation at the lowest end. This is the realm of positive, or kataphatic, theology. "But now," he continues, "as [our discourse] ascends from what is lower to what lies above, it contracts to the extent that it ascends, and, once it has completed its ascent, it will be wholly speechless and wholly united to the Unutterable." In the concluding two chapters, he supplies us with this ascent of negations. In Mystical Theology 4, he begins with the denial of the attribution of corporeal and passable aspects to the divinity: "Therefore we say that the Cause of all ... has neither body [soma] nor shape [schema] nor form [eidos] ... neither is He a place [topos] nor seen ... nor perceived [by the senses] ... nor is He troubled by material passions ... nor is He in need of light ... nor does He either have nor is He any one of the things which are perceived [by the senses]."

We then proceed to the intelligible names in the fifth and concluding chapter:

Moving yet higher we say that He is ... neither soul nor mind; neither has He imagination nor opinion nor reason [logos] nor intuitive knowing [noesis]; neither is He reason nor intuition; neither can He be reasoned or intuited. He is neither life nor does He live; neither is He being [ousia] nor eternity [aion] nor time.... He is neither oneness, nor deity, nor goodness. He is not spirit, as we understand [the term], nor sonship nor fatherhood.... He is no one of the things which are not, nor any one of those which are ... [thus] beyond affirmation ... and beyond negation is the transcendence of Him Who, simply, is beyond all things and free.

While I shall come back momentarily to a detail or two in my translation of these passages, I should like for now to finish up what we might call the case for the prosecution. In what we have just seen, there...