The Unity of Mystical Experience

The author examines whether mystical experiences across different religious and cultural traditions share a common core, arguing against a simple pendulum-swing model of alternating extremes (moralism vs. quietism) and instead proposing a synthetic unity at a central point of reality. The paper considers non-Christian and non-European mystics alongside Christian ones, noting that writers like Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Ananda Coomaraswamy have demonstrated close resemblances between these experiences over the past twenty years.

Study at a glance

Abstract

First of all I must apologise for borrowing the striking title from Professor Gilson without intending to present the same pattern in the matter of mystical experience as he presented in that of the philosophical. In Gilson’s deservedly famous work, the author traces the swing of the pendulum in the history of philosophy from the pure rationalism which is willing to admit ‘two truths’ rather than accept any tutelage from theology to that attractive over-simplification which he calls ‘theologism’ in which all human thought is made theological. The unity of such experience is to be found in the constant swing of the pendulum along the same path.It would be possible to show some similar swing in the realm of mysticism from the moralism which leaves no room for passivity with God to the excessive passivity of quietism. We might begin with St Peter and St Paul or St Ambrose and St Augustine, where the seeds of such divergence might be unearthed. But such is not the plan of this paper; for the experience to be considered is not simply European, nor yet even exclusively Christian. And the unity which we hope to disclose is not the uniform motion of the pendulum, but the union of synthesis in the central point of reality.There can be little doubt that there are men not Christian nor European whose experiences in the realms of religion, to say the least, bear a close resemblance to the experiences described by the greatest of Christian mystics. Writers—and many of them are not writers only for they have set out to taste the experience as well—such as Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, or even in another direction Ananda Coomaraswamy, have made this abundantly clear in the last twenty years.