Chapter 1 — Approaching Biblical Mysticism
Our task here is hard because Western writers seldom acknowledge the mystical element in Scripture unless they are generally hostile to the message of the Bible.
Biblical scholars range all over the map with varying degrees of commitment to the underlying claims of revelation. To the degree they seem to take it seriously as given, they also discount or avoid the mystical element. They either pretend it is simply out reach to the Western mind, or try to paint it as primitive, even sinister. Western Christian scholars somehow imagine Christ and Apostles rescued revelation from the evil clutches of those demonic mystics. Exceedingly rare is the Western scholar who honestly appraises the difference and embraces it, too. Readers will be hard put to find defenders of the Hebrew Mystical approach to reading the Bible.
As we shall see, moving from Eastern to Western intellectual assumptions is rather easy. Moving the other way is a monumental task. There has never been a society without a mythology (recalling our academic use of the term “mythology” in Part 1). The human soul, by definition, cannot gear up to meet reality with any intellectual advantage over animals unless it first has some organizing principle on which to build a frame of reference. Digging into one’s personal mythological foundation is a daunting task. It tends to be quite painful. Replacing that foundation is a major struggle many simply will not attempt. The meaning of meaning is a question too few will consider.
It is rare to find a Western scholar discussing Western Civilization in less than glowing terms. We can find plenty of Western critiques of elements or episodes in Western Civilization, but virtually no Western scholar criticizes the thing itself. At the very least it is defended, and is usually praised. You will typically find only a grudging willingness to call anything non-Western “civilization” in the first place. It is also quite rare when a Western scholar discusses any previous civilization in sympathetic terms.
Most of those who do cross over to another mythology tend to close the door behind them. They find it exceedingly difficult to keep their grip on the new truth while holding the door open to others. The ability to keep a foot in both worlds is often more than a viewpoint migrant can handle. This course aims at just that.
Part of the problem is the pervasive Western assumptions about reality. Even those who claim to embrace mysticism generally cling to an Aristotelian unitary universe. There is an unbreakable linkage between having all reality within this universe and having it within reach of the intellect. Western Mysticism is generally defined in terms of a higher form of logic and reason, tends to use familiar words differently, but still stands entirely within reach of native human capabilities. The image is one of tapping into unused parts of the conscious intellect. This is a half-truth.
The very foundation of Western Civilization is the primacy of the human intellect. It rules, must rule. The Hebrew approach finds the mind a useful servant, but a foul master. The Western mystic assumes the necessity of remaining the master of the exploration and the results of it. The Hebrew mystic assumes all humans serve one master or another, and the question is a matter of wisely choosing whom you serve (it’s never properly a “what” but a “whom”).
It’s easy enough to find scholarship recognizing this very substantial difference. However, much of that scholarship is cynical about revelation and willingly appeals to documentation and archeology outside the Bible. Such scholarship places the Hebrew Bible alongside other literature of the same type academically, deriding the notion it is anything special. Within their scholarly examination, the overlap between Hebrew and other ANE cultures is too extensive, and the distinctive elements not significant enough to justify what seems to them a purely political decision to keep Christianity so dominant. Given how Christian religious leaders have handled things historically, you can hardly blame them.
Our problem is digging into Biblical Mysticism with all the applicable Western tools until the door is open far enough we can put them away. Standing outside this doorway, we must of necessity recognize that the very nature of what’s beyond is utterly different from all our Western intellectual expectations. The starting point of this exploration is recognizing that you leave behind any vestigial hope of objectivity. The very notion of objectivity was created wholly within Western traditions, and is absent from, if not ridiculed openly by, every other intellectual tradition in the world since time began. Every prior civilization of which we are even dimly aware gave no place to the primacy of objectivity, as if it were even possible for the human soul to claim it.
It’s not as if there would not be some common pool of experience we might share between us within mysticism. There is entirely too much commonality in the human experience of life itself for that. Rather, the optimal use of mysticism as an intellectual orientation requires adopting a common mythology, but doing so consciously. That was the fundamental meaning of Moses spending time on Mount Sinai. He went to meet with God face to face, as it were, to receive a clearly defined mythology selected from the vast trove of what the Hebrew people carried with them up to that point. While forcing such a wholesale change on an entire nation didn’t work out too well, a voluntary, fully informed and conscious choice to embrace it is an integral part of the message of Christ.
The unspoken assumption in Jesus’ teachings was that God had chosen to speak from within a particular cultural background, with a fairly distinctive mythology. It wasn’t chosen at random; the narrative of Genesis lays out the story of how God worked through a chain of individuals to establish that mythology. God consciously built a frame of reference for His revelation. The Covenant of Moses was not simply a short list of treaty obligations we call The Ten Commandments. It was the entire narrative history of a particular thread of events leading up to that moment, with a body of understanding about His expectations for humanity. Our task is to discern what from that covenant repository remains universally applicable once outside the historical context.
On the one hand, the rituals and customs prescribed by Moses were not radically new to the Hebrew people. It was all familiar. So similar was it to the pagan religion of the Canaanites that Israel was constantly slipping and sliding into the local idolatry. It simply wasn’t that different in their minds. On the other hand, Moses made a radical claim that simply went over the heads of most Israelis: All other deities are imaginary. There was no other god ever; there had always been only one God in the first place. To the degree that might have registered, the common Israelite had no trouble thinking other religious expressions might be a valid alternative, that Moses was being crabby and exclusive for political reasons. They rejected the idea God chose Moses as his primary representative.
The only way to quell such a natural reaction was for individuals to experience God themselves. Not indirectly, as a spectator to the mighty miracles. Despite the very concrete evidence that others could not reproduce the miracles of Moses, there remained a solid resentment against him. Some of the most earth shattering experiences could not change their fundamental thought processes. It was too easy to dismiss or associate events with a different meaning. But that personal encounter with God as your Sovereign Lord changes everything.
The degree to which that experience is available to everyone is impossible to define. We can state with certainty only that it is necessary, and indicate correlations of what comes with it, but each individual must of necessity get there on their own.
The definition of mysticism itself is not about the content of your minds, but the pathway you take to arrive at your thoughts and beliefs. In the ANE tradition, mysticism is the apprehension of truth from outside the conscious mental processes. Revelation second-hand — told or written — can start the process if the mind is ready to accept that input. However, the ultimate goal is to permit the individual their own unique connection with that higher truth from within, to establish their own individual link to that other realm of existence. This whole thing assumes quite contrary to Aristotle that this universe is not the extent of things, but is frankly a lesser existence aside from the ultimate reality. Plato and his Ideal falls short of this, because the ANE mystic assumes the human mind has no capacity to handle that Ideal. It requires a separate faculty that belongs to that other realm, a linkage initiated on the other end.
The unique Biblical Mysticism consciously and willfully embraces the cultural orientation of Moses and his nation as God’s one authorized mythology upon which to build. This is accepted as the proper frame of reference for understanding Jesus. There are complications as we shall see, but the struggle before us is the very lack of documentation supporting this approach. We are left with a combination of fragmentary accurate scholarship that is hostile to our intent and a vast ocean of inaccurate friendly scholarship. While Western Christian scholarship contains flashes and patches of accuracy, we are hard put to find anything wholly trustworthy.
The referenced reading material takes on a different flavor in this second part of our course. The student is warned in advance that the task of shifting over to Biblical Mysticism tends to be a long and slow process. Embracing it is merely the first step of a long and frustrating search. Due to the dearth of external materials, the following chapters will be longer and more in depth.
Recommended readings: Encyclopedic surveys of Eastern Philosophy, focusing particularly on ANE cultures. The author’s essay, East versus West: a Review of Epistemology, can introduce the nature of the conflict.
