Can there be such a thing as Mormon Mysticism?

Last updated on: November 7, 2012 at 9:51 pm by William Hamblin

Can there be such a thing as Mormon Mysticism? 2012-11-07T21:51:01-07:00 William Hamblin

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One occasionally hears the idea bandied about that there are Mormon mystics and mysticism, or that Joseph Smith was a mystic. Is there such a thing as Mormon Mysticism? My answer is: I don’t know. But I have a few observations on the topic.

The first problem is defining mysticism. The idea that there is a religious phenomena called mysticism, shared in all major religions, is a decidedly modern concept, growing out of specific historical circumstances in the West. No actual practicing mystic before the twentieth century would have agreed with this idea. Sufis don’t have a “mystical” relationship with God. They have a sufistic relationship with Allah, intimately based on the Qurʾān. It is impossible to imagine Sufis without the Qurʾān. Greek Orthodox Hesychast mystics would generally reject the idea that their practices, beliefs and experiences have anything to do with Hinduism or Buddhism.

Hence modern attempts at equating different forms of spiritual practices in all religions under the rubric of mysticism are dubious, outsider activities. Furthermore, finding a definition of mysticism that is narrow enough to relate to the specific mystical practices and beliefs of a particular religion or movement, and yet at the same time is broad enough to include all the beliefs and practices of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists or Hindus is basically impossible. There can no more be a generic thing mysticism without a specific religious tradition of belief and practice, than there can be a generic thing called religion without a specific tradition of belief and practice.

I also very much doubt that there is anything in the Bible that fits twenty-first century concepts of mysticism. The fundamental mystical concepts of contemplation/theoria, and God as nous/mind/intellect who can only be approached in through the nous/mind are Platonic in origin, and entered into the biblical tradition through Philo (as Christianized), and the Christian tradition through Christian Neoplatonists such as Origin, Augustine and Dionysius the Pseudo-Aeropagite, (see A. Louth, The Origins of Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, Oxford 1981), and can be found in the pagan Hermetica as well. This is not to say, of course, that there were not later mystical interpretations of the Bible. There were. But they had been decontextualized from the original meaning of the biblical texts.

I am dubious that there is any biblical theophanic experience that can be equated with modern understandings of mysticism. Biblical theophanies are nearly always visionary or auditory. Again, that is not to say that mystics have not interpreted biblical theophanies as mystical experiences (such as Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Moses), but this is again retrojection later mystical concepts onto the decontextualized biblical texts.

Medieval and Platonic mystical concepts of contemplation/theoria can be equated with modern concepts of mediation only in its broadest sense. The equation of the two is a modern construction. Contempatio is the Latin translation of the Platonic theoria. It is brought into Christian thought via the Platonization of Christianity by Origin, Augustine and Dionysius, etc. It describes the way the nous/intellect of man comprehends the nous/intellect of God. In its Christian form it has little to do with Buddhist style meditation, which is generally how the term is understood today.

Christian mysticism has historically been intimately connected with monasticism in both eastern and western forms of Christianity. The greatest mystics were all monks. Mystical union with God–the ultimate goal of the Christian mystic–was believed attainable only by people who spent their entire lives in utter devotion to God through the monastic path. (See the major mystical figures outlined in B. McGinn’s The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mystics, 5 vols. 2004-2012, where as far as I can tell nearly all of the major Christian mystics he describes are monks or nuns.) This monastic monopoly on mysticism began to break down only in the early modern period. The contemporary belief that one can be a mystic without living the monastic life is a deviation from the original Christian mystical tradition. The great Orthodox mystical compendium the Philokalia likewise assumes its readers are monks.

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