Mystic

A mystic is not, strictly, an office at all: a mystic is recognised rather than appointed, one whose account of direct experience of the divine is accepted by a tradition.

Experience, not office

What defines the mystic is the claim to a direct, immediate experience of the divine or the ultimate, an encounter or union beyond the ordinary reach of doctrine and rite, and this is a matter of experience and its reception rather than of any position conferred, so no one is ordained a mystic. A tradition may come to accept a person as a genuine mystic on the strength of their life, their teaching and the fruits of their experience, but the recognition follows the experience rather than granting an office.

Within and across traditions

Mystics appear in every major tradition, the contemplatives and visionaries of Christianity, the Sufis of Islam, the Kabbalists of Judaism, the realised sages of the Indian traditions, and their accounts of direct experience have often stood in a delicate relation to the institutional authorities, sometimes revered, sometimes suspected, since a claim to immediate knowledge of God can sit uneasily with a religion of doctrine and hierarchy. The comparison of mystics across traditions has been a major theme of the modern study of religion, some scholars stressing a common core of experience and others the shaping of each experience by its own tradition. The mystic is thus less a role than a recognised standing, granted to those whose reported experience of the divine a tradition comes to accept.

Claiming direct, unmediated experience of the divine has historically been dangerous as often as it has been honoured. The Sufi mystic al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922 after reportedly declaring ana al-Haqq, I am the Truth, a statement authorities read as a blasphemous claim to divine identity rather than as the language of mystical union it was intended to be, and centuries later the German Christian mystic Meister Eckhart had a series of his propositions condemned by papal authority in 1329, shortly after his death, on the grounds that they could be read as denying a real distinction between God and the soul. Both cases illustrate the same structural tension noted elsewhere in this entry, an institution built on doctrine reacting against a claim of experience that bypasses doctrine to reach the divine directly.

In the past few decades the mystical experience itself, rather than the doctrinal dispute it provokes, has become an object of direct scientific study, with researchers in a field sometimes called neurotheology using brain imaging to examine what is happening neurologically during meditative or contemplative states reported as mystical, work that has documented measurable changes in brain activity during such states without thereby settling, or attempting to settle, the separate theological question of whether the experience constitutes genuine contact with a real divine reality.