Osama bin Laden and a Return to a Perennial Theory of Mystical Union
by Jens Söring

Jens Söring is the author of The Way of the Prisoner: Breaking the Chains of Self through Centering Prayer and Centering Practice (Lantern Books, 2003). Himself a prisoner at the Brunswick Correctional Center in Virginia, Mr. Söring embraced Christianity in 1994 and was received into the Catholic Church in the spring of 2002 during rites held in the prison’s visiting room. He practices Centering Prayer three times a day, his ears plugged to block the noise of prison life. Although he hopes for a possible release on discretionary parole, he said in a recent newspaper interview that in any case “God has freed me in a way that’s meaningful to me and, through my writing, to others.“ We are pleased to present his article, with its reflections on mysticism in the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism, to the readers of our bulletin.

If Osama bin Laden can watch satellite TV in his current cave, he must be the happiest man in the world. His wildest dreams have become reality! The seed of the 9/11 terrorist attacks bore fruit of the most spectacular kind in “Operation Iraqi Freedom”—in effect, a weeks-long infomercial for the great war between Islam and Judeo-Christianity. Thanks to al-Jazeera, the world’s one billion Muslims have now been sold the idea that Arabs and Americans can only communicate by means of cruise missiles and suicide bombers.

Of course not all causes of this clash of civilizations are of a religious nature. On one side there is poverty and political disenfranchisement, and on the other we have—let us be honest—just a little isolationist ignorance and cultural arrogance. Differences like these can be attenuated, however, if Iraqis learn to vote and Americans come to appreciate the beauty of Babylonian ziggurats. Where building bridges will be much harder is precisely in matters of faith, because each side believes the other is fundamentally wrong.

No Christian considers Mohammad a true prophet of God on the order of John the Baptist, and no Muslim thinks Allah took on the flesh of a Palestinian Jew named Jesus. Moreover, just as 9/11 persuaded the West that violence is somehow an integral part of Islam, so has the recent Gulf War convinced Arabs that Christians will always be Crusaders at heart. Thus on one level Osama bin Laden is correct in framing this conflict in religious terms, cross versus crescent. We are divided by our most cherished beliefs and by our deepest fears.

Historically, wars of religion only end when one side is completely subjugated by the other, or when both collapse from their mutual bloodletting: witness Cromwell’s Protectorate and the Thirty Years’ War. If these options seem unappealing today, then perhaps it is not too early to look for some common ground from which Muslims, Christians and even Jews might work together to end the fighting. The lives we save may be our own, or our children’s.

Any cease-fire we might negotiate must, of course, be of a religious nature, since our divergent belief systems lie at the heart of our strife. But the three great pillars of any religion—ritual, theology and morality—offer no room for ecumenical compromise: the prostrations toward Mecca, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the primacy of the Law (Torah) are simply nonnegotiable. So we shall have to examine less obvious elements of our three faiths for possible commonalities.

This essay proposes that one religious experience Muslims, Christians and Jews can at least potentially share is the mystical union of a believer’s soul with Allah, God or YHWH. Whether this spiritual phenomenon can serve as a practical basis for ending the violent conflict between our faiths is another matter; time may or may not tell. What is certain, however, is that sooner or later we must develop some such areas of mutual agreement between our religions. If nothing else, this essay may inspire wiser heads than mine to search for more suitable Archimedean points from which to move our fractured world toward peace.

Of course the experience of mystical union in contemplative prayer can only function as a common basis for religious armistice talks if Muslim fana’, Christian unio mystica, and Jewish devekut indeed all refer to the same ultimate spiritual Reality. Early modern scholars of mysticism such as Evelyn Underhill held precisely this view, which became known as perennialism: “Whatever be the theological formula under which [mystical union] is understood, ... [it expresses] the innate tendency of the human spirit toward complete harmony with the transcendental order.”1 In the second half of the twentieth century, however, “our awareness of the specific quality of each religion has increased” and revealed the perennial theory to be “erroneously simplistic,” according to Yale University’s Louis Dupré. Indeed, advocates of Underhill’s position are said to be “rapidly dwindling” in today’s universities.2

What scholars like Dupré have done is, in essence, to apply the familiar Kantian interpretative scheme to ancient, medieval and modern texts describing mystical union. The underlying assumption is that all experiences are mediated: we do not encounter reality itself in our minds, but an image of reality which has been filtered and indeed re-formed by our physical, psychological and cultural apparatus. Thus every single object that presents itself to our consciousness is a mixed creation, consisting in part of sensory input and in part of our (unconscious) interpretation and reshaping of that input.

All of the above is common intellectual fare, of course; the question is whether this analytical framework can properly be applied to mystical union. If yes, then a Muslim’s experience of fana’ is at its very heart entirely unlike a Christian’s experience of unio mystica, because the Islamic conceptual grid of the former actually created a different reality than the filtering system of the latter. But if no—if I can show that Kant has no business with, say, St. John of the Cross and al-Ghazzali—then Muslims, Christians and Jews would have at least one point of true, and truly profound, agreement.

Before I attempt to peel apart the experience of mystical union, however, I think it would be useful to introduce a few first-hand descriptions of this phenomenon, to serve as a basis for subsequent discussion. Of course the following textual excerpts cannot be said to be truly representative of the mystical literature of several faiths across two millennia. Also, I have chosen to focus only on accounts of the “gold standard” of mysticism: introvertive union without affect, a unitive experience that occurs during contemplative prayer or its equivalent and lacks any strong emotional component. (In addition to this type of union, scholars speak of [1] introvertive union with affect, which again takes place in contemplation but is marked by powerful feelings of love, awe or joy; [2] extrovertive union, which may or may not happen during prayer and consists of seeing God shining through the physical world, including people; and [3] the “pure consciousness event,” in which the contemplative briefly enters a trance that he/she only becomes aware of immediately afterward. No doubt these other types of mystical experiences involve some sort of genuine and profound union between the practitioner and his/her God, but the first two clearly include elements of the mystic’s personality and thus are subject to mediation. The third is somewhat disputed both among scholars and contemplatives: some do not distinguish between it and introvertive union without affect, others do not mention the “pure consciousness event” at all, and still others appear to dismiss its spiritual value.)

Let us begin, then, with a twentieth-century American Christian mystic, Thomas Merton, who underwent an introvertive union without affect (unio mystica) during contemplative prayer. He wrote:

Our second excerpt comes from the same faith, Christianity, but from an entirely different era and country: fourteenth-century Germany. Meister Eckhart’s disciple Johannes Tauler wrote:

In the next few passages we remain in roughly the same time period—the Middle Ages—but move on to Islam’s mystical branch, Sufism. Al-Ghazzali wrote:

The “annihilation” of the limited individual self—the apparent disappearance or “conceal[ment]” of “soul and body,” “intellect or perception”—must not be understood as a negative experience, however: “The self in the final station drowns in its love to the point that it has no more feeling of itself or even of its love. The lover arrives at a station in which he says: I am my beloved. My beloved is I.”8

When our first (Christian) writer, Thomas Merton, transcended the bounds of personality and reached such a sefless union with his “beloved,” he “felt the doors fly open into infinite freedom, into a wealth which is perfect”; and so it is with Sufi mystics in fana’:

Medieval Jewish mystics also wrote of reaching spiritual states “where you do not speak, nor can you speak, ... [where] that which is within will manifest itself without, ... [where] one sees that his inmost being is something outside of himself.”10 The predominant view among modem scholars like Gershom Scholem is that such descriptions of devekut, or “cleaving to” YHWH in prayer, do not in fact refer to a union with the divine, but this thesis has recently been challenged by Moshe Idel and others.11 Certainly some medieval rabbis detailed at length how the mystic in devekut “is comprised in [YHWH ], blessed be He, out of the annihilation of his whole individuality and his whole vitality.”12 For our purposes we need not take sides in this scholarly dispute but may content ourselves with the following early kabbalistic passage:

As we near the end of our collection of data points on mystical union, let us take a brief detour—if indeed it is a detour—to a twentieth century account of Zen satori. In Buddhism there is no “soul” that might be “united” with a “God,” of course, but there are nevertheless interesting echoes coming from the East:

And finally, to round out our circle, as it were, we have a twenty-first century description of mystical union during prayer by a Christian contemplative who once was a practicing Buddhist:

This concludes our not-so-quick review of some primary source material on mystical union. Our original question remains: do these accounts of Christian unio mystica, Muslim fana’, Jewish devekut and possibly even Zen satori all describe the same ultimate spiritual Reality? Or did each of these mystics’ conceptual grid—his psychological make-up, his belief system, etc.—play such a central, formational role in the experience of union that the Christian monk’s encounter with divine “love” during contemplation was fundamentally different from the Sufi poet’s? If the former, we may have a starting point, however small, for eventual reconciliation between cross and crescent and Star of David; if the latter, we probably need to expand the cruise-missile factories.

Notes
1. Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism, Preface (London: Methuen, 1911).
2. Louis Dupré, ed., Introduction to Light from Light, 2nd ed. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001).
3. Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, (Norfolk, CT, and New York: New Directions, 1961), 31.
4. Johann Tauler, Sermon on St. John the Baptist, trans. A.W. Hilton (London: Library of Devotion, 1909).
5. Al-Ghazzali, Confessions, trans. C. Field (London: Wisdom of the East Series, 1909).
6. Junayd, Kitab al-Mithaq, trans. A.H. Abdel-Kader, Personality and Writings of Junayd (E.W. Gibb Memorial, 1976).
7. Farid al-Din Attar, Ilahi-name, trans. A. Schimmel, And Muhammed Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill, 1985).
8. Junayd, trans. Rosenthal, F., “A Judeo-Arabic Work under Sufi Influence,” Hebrew Union College Annual, vol. 15 (Cincinnati, 1940).
9. Jalalu d’Din, trans. R.A. Nicholson, Selected Poems from the Divan I Shamsi Tabriz, (Cambridge, U.K., 1898).
10. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1946).
11. Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, 1988).
12. Rabbi Menahem Mendel, Sefer Peri Ha-Arez (Jerusalem, 1970).
13. Vatican M.S. 283, fol 71 b. See also Moshe Idel, The Mystical Experience in Abrahalm Abulafia (New York, 1988).
14. Sokei-an Sasaki, “The Transcendental World,” Zen Notes, vol. 1, no. 5 (New York: First Zen Institute of America, 1954).
15. Jens Söring, The Way of the Prisoner, Intermezzo (New York: Lantern Books, 2003).

Next: Söring (continued)

Bulletin 72 • Index