Abstract
This essay considers the tradition of apophatic mysticism through the lens of mediation. Focusing on the work of John Ruusbroec and Meister Eckhart, the essay develops a theory of ‘divine mediation,’ a form of mediation that encompasses the paradoxical negation of mediation itself.
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Notes
Thanks to Jen Boyle for highlighting the ways in which mysticism both adopts and challenges current media theory.
Ruusbroec is here reiterating the mystical theme of kenosis, in which the divine ‘empties’ itself out into the human creature, and, at the same time, the ‘self-emptying’ of the human creature that prepares it for divine union.
Scott Wilson, in his comments on a draft of this essay (Crowd Review, 2011), has pointed out the topological features of Ruusbroec's abyss that roughly correlates to the concepts of ‘Thing’ and ‘void’ in Lacan, developed, most recently, by Gabriel Catren (2011). I regret not being able to explore this more in the essay. Suffice it to say that, for Ruusbroec, these three meanings of ‘wayless abyss’ each imply a point where all distinctions cease (necessarily requiring one to accept contradiction or at least some form of para-consistent logic). This wayless abyss has fairly recognizable topological features. In the first sense, the wayless abyss emphasizes being lost and wandering – but this can turn in on itself, where ‘going out’ to the divine is really a way of ‘going in’ and vice-versa. In the second sense, the wayless abyss is apophatic, leading only to a limit of all ‘ways,’ which results in a collapse of interior/exterior. Finally, the emphasis on the abyss in Ruusbroec seems to invite closer comparison to ‘the Thing’ in Lacan (and Heidegger), a paradoxical enclosure of emptiness. The question is whether Ruusbroec – or Eckhart – conceives of this abyss topologically in terms of enclosure or holes (or ‘holiness’). While the language of apophaticism does contain the contradictory ‘superlative negation’ that one finds in Lacanian psychoanalysis, neither Ruusbroec nor Eckhart are systematic enough to ‘model’ the subject in this strictly topological fashion. In a way, this essay is an attempt to address the question of exactly how, then, a thinker like Eckhart does conceive of this ‘superlative negation.’
This is a motif articulated in the apophatic tradition by Dionysius the Areopagite and subsequently by John Scottus Eriugena. For more, see Carlson (1999, 154–189); Sells (1994, 34–62); Thacker (2010, 25ff.); and Turner (1995, 19–49).
Ruusbroec further elaborates this idea of mystics being ‘drunk with God’: ‘With restless longing they often raise their heads to heaven with eyes wide open; at one moment they are full of joy, at another they are weeping; at one moment they are singing, at another shouting; first they feel weal, then woe, and often both at once; they jump and run about, clap their hands together, kneel and bow down, and flurry about in many similar ways’ (Ruusbroec, 1985, 261).
Ruusbroec, however, was at pains to distance himself both from the Eckhartian tradition, as well as from heresies such as the Free Spirit movement. For more, see James A. Wiseman's introduction in Ruusbroec (1985); Dupré (1984); and Underhill (1915).
On Eckhart's concept of nothing/nothingness with respect to continental philosophy, see Caputo (1986, 97–139); Lanzetta (1992); and Schürmann (1978, 135–168). On Eckhart's relation to Buddhism, see Ueda (2004).
In his comments to a draft of this essay, Nicola Masciandaro notes how this negation of the self may open on to new ways of understanding the ‘becoming’ of mediation, ‘whether it lets itself be butchered open by the outside or whether it only finds new ways of affording itself for the world’ (Crowd Review, 2011). This ‘nothing-ing’ of the self in Eckhart also raises the challenge of a strange ethics without a self (and by extension an ethics without the human). As Masciandaro puts it, citing a passage from the essay, ‘[w]hat, where, is the art … the method, the way of staying in the abyssic “situation in which the fullest mediation and the impossibility of mediation become one in the same”?’
Caputo (1986) notes this apparent duplicity in his comparison of Eckhart and the later Heidegger.
On Eckhart's metaphysics of flow, see McGinn (2001, 71ff.) As McGinn notes, God in Eckhart is at once bullitio (overflowing, beneficent, generosity) and ebullitio (flowing onward and outward into creatures and the world).
This is a coinage of François Laruelle (1996) to describe the pre-philosophical decision of philosophy, that anything is philosophizable.
This would be the place to dig deeper into Scott Wilson's comments (see note 3 above) on the paradoxical ‘extimacy’ in Lacan. It also invites further discussion concerning Nicola Masciandaro's suggestion (see note 8 above) that a certain praxis of mysticism ultimately leads us to think about the breakdown of metaphysical versus mystical correlation (or as he calls it, a ‘self-hunting’). Perhaps this can be done both from the vantage point of philosophy as well as mysticism. For instance, one could imagine a reading of Kant in which the foundational division between phenomena and noumena basically causes a rift in metaphysics, such that noumena and the (im)possibility of its mediation becomes a question of mysticism. In short, Kant's ‘Copernican’ turn may also be read as the shift from – or implosion of – metaphysical to mystical correlation.
References
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Thacker, E. Wayless abyss: Mysticism, mediation and divine nothingness. Postmedieval 3, 80–96 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2011.24