Abstract
“The mystical” as an expression, in the sense I use it here, stems from Angela Ales Bello who proposed it as a translation of the German term “Mystik.” The mystical is not to be confused with mysticism, because the meaning of the latter is more ambiguous than that of the former. The mystical is a sui generis phenomenon which opens a genuine connection with reality without destroying, dissolving, or eliminating the human persons involved. The mystical has a long history reaching back to times immemorial; however, a more concrete development is detectable in Western history, where the mystical shows a peculiar evolution. In this evolution, the unique historic occurrence of Auschwitz—as the realization of “historic evil”—has a central place. As Jewish and Christian reflections convincingly show, the experience of historic evil fundamentally changed the history of mysticism. Auschwitz underpinned the special character of the mystical and helped humanity to leave behind the earlier, confused and inarticulate kinds of mysticism.
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Walther, Gerda : Phänomenologie der Mystik . Olten und Freiburg: Walter, 1976.
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See Kittel—Friedrich (eds): Theological Dictionary of The New Testament . Translator and editor Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1980–1982.
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To my knowledge as yet, there is no reliable scholarly work on a universal history of mysticism. What we possess are rather case studies and comparative analyses of certain works, persons, or developments, or again expositions of a certain, rather philosophical perspective of mysticism. With this in mind, the works of William James, Evelyn Underhill, or W. T. Stace are useful sources. See also the introductory parts of Randall Studstill’s The Unity of Mystical Traditions (Leiden-Boston: Brill, 2005).
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See the discussion in Studstill, op. cit., 5 ff.
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See also my analysis in B. Mezei: Vallásbölcselet, Gödöllő: Attractor, 2005, vol. I, 2. §.
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See the intertwining of religions in mystical experience , Hick, John: Between Faith and Doubt. Dialogues on Religion and Reason. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, 39–40.
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See Ales Bello, Angela: The Divine in Husserl and Other Explorations. Berlin-New York: Springer, 2008, 68 ff. McAlister, Linda Lopez: Gerda Walther, in: Waithe, M.E. (ed.), History of Women Philosophers, vol. 4, 189–406. See also Steinbock, Anthony: Phenomenology and Mysticism. The Verticality of Religious Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007, 28. – However, Steinbock does not seem to have recognized the unique character of Walther’s importance in a phenomenology of mysticism.
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Ales Bello: op. cit., 76. She notes too that Hedwig Conrad-Martius, one of the Munich phenomenologists, encouraged Walther to republish her work on the mystical in the 1950s.
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Gerda Walther: op. cit., 22. My emphasis.
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I am aware of the difficulty of this claim in view of important works of comparative religion and metaphysics. However, the argument I propose underpins the claim, for it is only in Western mysticism that we have a well formed notion of human personhood and a corresponding notion of God as well.
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See for details Mezei, B. M.: Religion and Revelation after Auschwitz , New York: Bloomsbury, 2013, 194: “[Robert] Spaemann belongs to the few contemporary thinkers who have a unified understanding of human personhood as evolving from the Hellenistic and biblical sources and reaching new forms throughout the history of Western thought. For Spaemann, human persons are ultimate unities, a fact earlier thinkers did not see as distinctly as we do today.”
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See Mezei 2013, op. cit., 6.
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Mezei, B.M. (2017). The Mystical After Auschwitz. In: Vassányi, M., Sepsi, E., Daróczi, A. (eds) The Immediacy of Mystical Experience in the European Tradition. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45069-8_17
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