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Mystical Consciousness:
A Modest Proposal1
Bernard McGinn
Introduction
The relation between mysticism and spirituality has long been a topic of dis-
44 cussion. The links between the two are rooted in the history of the use of terms
like mysticus and spiritualis in Christianity since at least the second century.
Spiritualitas is an ancient term, first appearing in the fourth century and based
on the frequent use of pneumatikos/spiritualis in the New Testament.2 The
Greek qualifier mystikos and its derivatives do not occur in the New Testa-
ment, but from ca. 200 C. E. Christian authors began to use mystikos/mysticus
to signify the hidden realities of their beliefs and practices.3 By about 500 C.
E., the mysterious author who wrote under the pseudonym Dionysius had
invented the term mystical theology (theologia mystikê), although “mysticism”
as a stand-alone substantive is more modern, not used before the seventeenth
century at the earliest.4 These two language-fields, the mystical and the spiri-
tual, became so intertwined in the course of history as to seem almost neces-
sarily related, however one understands their meanings. If we take spirituality
as a broad term signifying the whole range of beliefs and practices by which
the Christian church strives to live out its commitment to the Spirit present in
the Risen Christ (1 Cor. 6:14–20; 2 Cor. 3:17), then we can understand mysti-
cism as the inner and hidden realization of spirituality through a transforming
consciousness of God’s immediate presence. Mysticism, or more precisely, the
mystical element within Christian spirituality, is the goal to which spiritual
practices aim. It is a personal appropriation, but not an individualistic one,
because it is rooted in the life of the Christian community and the grace medi-
ated through that community and its sacraments and rituals. If this way of
construing the relationship between spirituality and mysticism makes sense, it
is clear that the investigation of the nature of mysticism, especially the role of
what is usually called mystical experience, is an important part of the study of
spirituality.
The following essay argues that mystical experience, while often analyzed
and explored, may not be the best term for discerning the meaning of mysti-
cism as an integral part of spirituality. My alternative proposal is to suggest
that the notion of consciousness as developed by Bernard Lonergan in his
analysis of human intentionality may provide a more adequate theoretical basis
SPIRITUS | 8.1 Spiritus 8 (2008): 44–63 © 2008 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
for investigating mysticism, and also one that provides a better insight into the
writings of the mystics themselves. After briefly setting out some of the prob-
lems concerning the use of mystical experience, Part I of the essay will lay out
the basic structure of a Lonergan-inspired theory of mystical consciousness,
while Part II will illustrate this theory through a short investigation of three of
the most noted Western Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, Nicholas of Cusa,
and St. John of the Cross.
SPIRITUS | 8.1
achieves self-transcendence and transformation through an encounter with
God, the ultimate Source and final Goal.
SPIRITUS | 8.1
in making this transposition are significant. Religious consciousness begins
with a special gift of God’s love, not with any specific attentiveness, insight, or
choice on the part of the human subject. Lonergan often cites the Pauline text
about “God’s love being poured out in our hearts” (Rom. 5:5) to indicate the
basis for religious intentionality in a gift from above.23 As received in the sub-
ject, this gift produces a state of being in love with God in an unrestricted way.
Lonergan characterizes the location of this reception in rather different ways.
In Method he says “God’s love occupies the ground and root of the fourth and
highest level of man’s intentional consciousness. It takes place over the peak of
the soul, the apex animae,”24 whereas in Philosophy of God and Theology he
is willing to speak of the permanent dynamic state of being in love with God 49
as existing on a “fifth level.”25 Lonergan insists that the gift of love is prior to
all knowledge. Reflecting on the Latin tag, “Nihil amatum nisi praecognitum”
(Nothing is loved unless known), he says that this is the rule for ordinary op-
erations on the fourth level, but that the gift of God’s love flooding our hearts
forms the major exception.26 Furthermore, the gift of divine love produces a
special form of knowledge called faith—“From an experience of love focused
on mystery there wells forth a longing for knowledge.”27 When we ask why the
longing for knowledge that is identified with fundamental faith (not, Lonergan
insists, the judgments that constitute religious beliefs) must be posterior to
love, the reasons given are a mixture of the theoretical and the practical. He
summarizes: “We have distinguished between faith and religious beliefs. We
have done so as a consequence of our view that there is a realm in which love
precedes knowledge. And we have also done so as a consequence of our view
that this manner of speech facilitates ecumenical discourse.”28 One can, howev-
er, question whether love must be given either temporal or logical priority over
knowing as the basic experiential root of religious conversion, especially when
we are dealing with the unrestricted divine gift of the God in whom infinite
intelligibility and absolute love are one and the same (more on this below).
If general transcendental method is further specified and differentiated in
religious method, we may ask if there is a specifically mystical form of method.
Is mystical consciousness a development of religious consciousness, or some-
thing different and special? Lonergan is not clear on this.29 Nevertheless, I
believe that the implications of Lonergan’s analysis of transcendental method
support an argument that mystical consciousness is a further differentiation
of religious consciousness and not some different thing. This does not mean,
however, that it is not possible to analyze the distinctive transformations of
the forms of intentionality present in mystical consciousness. Lonergan himself
suggests this in allowing for what he called “mystical experience of the tran-
scendent,” without trying to specify the difference between religious experi-
ence and mystical experience. When asked about whether mystical works such
SPIRITUS | 8.1
new and special perception or experience of God; it also involves the way in
which this perception restructures the subject’s drive to understand, affirm, and
live out the gift received. The intellectual and affective appropriation of the
new perception of God’s presence is not a secondary phenomenon, an interpre-
tation that almost inevitably alters and distorts the original perception. It is de-
manded by the reception itself. This appropriation involves both ordinary acts
of understanding, loving, and deciding, as well as transcendentalized forms of
the same intentional acts that reflect the presence of the divine by way of what
Merton called meta-consciousness.
This position agrees with the witness of the Christian mystics, who have
taught that both knowing and loving are integral to the encounter with God.31 51
Most mystics have accorded some kind of priority to love, because as 1 John
4:16 puts it, “God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and
God in him.” They also argue that the divine infinity is radically unknowable
to the limited human mind, but that love involves endless yearning for the en-
joyment of the beloved that can never reach fulfillment and therefore shares in
infinity. But is knowing God through co-presence the same kind of knowing as
that of the philosopher or theologian who seeks to present an argued account
of the divine nature and attributes? Rather, it seems that the kind of knowing
by which we come to affirm something of God on the basis of our inner recep-
tion of the divine presence, as well as the kind of loving with which we re-
spond to this gift, are not the same, at least in all respects, as the knowing and
loving we direct toward limited created persons and realities, or even toward
God as an object of rational reflection. Mystical teachers such as William of
Saint-Thierry, Meister Eckhart, and John of the Cross reflected deeply on the
similarities and differences between ordinary knowing and mystical knowing
of God. Other mystics such as Richard of St. Victor and Jan van Ruusbroec
explored the differences between loving created persons and loving the Uncre-
ated Divine Lover.
An analysis based on consciousness provides a better understanding of the
relation between love and knowledge in the mystical pursuit of God, as well as
casting light on the kinds of transformations that ordinary knowing and loving
undergo in this journey. This approach suggests that on the initial pre-reflective
level where the subject is grasped by the gift of God’s presence it is not possible
to distinguish knowing from loving. There is no apprehension of God as object
here; rather, the divine presence becomes active in the soul’s ground of aware-
ness. So too there is no loving God as an object of desire, but only a co-pres-
ence of infinite divine love.32 This new affective state is conscious, that is, pres-
ent to the subject, but not yet explicitly known or objectified. It can become
known, but only in an indirect way as a tendency or drive, not as something
capable of conceptualization, because of its unlimited and unrestricted nature.
This state may be described as an intensification of the gift of love given in
52
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affirm the final validity of any idea of God, such a move would abandon the
realm of the mystical and threaten to subvert the very ground of its distinctive
intentionality. But are there other modes of approaching the intellective side of
mystical meta-consciousness?
Lonergan himself several times evoked the mystical metaphor of the
“cloud of unknowing,” although he did not try to integrate its potential into
his analysis of consciousness.35 In reflecting on the intellective dimension of
mystical awareness James Price distinguished between “bare consciousness,”
“traditionally identified with the apophatic state,” and “mystical conscious-
ness,” which he described as “a state in which an explicit awareness of union
with the transcendent emerges,” that is, oneness with the ground of conscious- 53
ness.36 Louis Roy questioned this distinction, which, in his eyes, risks the dan-
ger of giving an “object-like content to mystical consciousness.”37
I propose another way of thinking about the intellective dimension of
mystical consciousness, one that both utilizes an aspect of Lonergan’s transcen-
dental method and that also reflects a central element in Christian mysticism,
the notion of docta ignorantia. In both Insight and Method Lonergan spoke
of “inverse insight,” that is, apprehending “that in some fashion the point is
that there is no point.”38 Lonergan restricted the term to the realm of ordinary
cognition, but we might conceive of the intellective aspect of mystical meta-
consciousness as the ground for a form of transcendental inverse insight, that
is, a negative act of understanding in line with what mystics since Augustine
(who first used the term) called “learned ignorance.”39 A transcendental inverse
insight has no specific content. It is not a concept, but a thematized awareness
of the truth that the human drive to know is grounded in the constant pursuit
of the God who always remains unknowable in his infinite mystery. This is not
mere, or “ignorant” ignorance, but the “learned ignorance” that is the product
of intense efforts to thematize the limits of all knowing (see, for example, Dio-
nysius, Eckhart, and Cusa, to name but a few). Through this intellectual effort
God’s unknowable infinity becomes co-present in the mystic’s mind as a new
and higher form of inverse insight, though naturally when he or she brings this
insight to expression words and concepts must be employed. These concepts,
however, because they have a different origin from our ordinary insights, often
do not make sense in the world of customary Aristotelian discourse and logic.40
The mystic therefore both loves, consciously and unrestrictedly, on the basis of
the gift of God’s direct presence in the ground of awareness, and consciously
and unrestrictedly knows and affirms the horizon of divine unknowability
through the practice of docta ignorantia.
SPIRITUS | 8.1
then the divine self-reflection, the “complete return” (reditio completa) that
constitutes God as a Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is the only act of
understanding that truly exists. This divine “No-thing-ness,” or indistinction,
is also present in us, that is, in the human mind as true imago dei. Humanity,
according to Eckhart, is what it is through intellect, “because intellect is open
to infinity.”48 Eckhart, unlike Thomas, insisted that the human mind exists on
two levels: on the virtual, or pre-existent, level in God as imago dei, the perfect
image identical with the Word; and also on the actual level of created existence
as made ad imaginem. On the virtual level the intellect is not just no mate-
rial thing and therefore capable of receiving the forms of all material things,
as Thomas taught, but it is no-thing at all in its complete identity with God. 55
“Therefore,” as Eckhart says in Sermon XXIX, “to rise up to intellect, to be
attached to it, is to be united to God. To be united, to be one, is to be one with
God. . . . Every kind of existence that is outside or beyond intellect is a crea-
ture; it is creatable, other than God, and is not God. In God there is nothing
other” (In deo enim non est aliud).49 In Eckhart’s view the infinite receptiv-
ity of the intellect as intellect is the ground of mystical consciousness. In the
silence and stillness of perfect interiority God works in the passive intellect not
by bestowing knowledge of any-thing, but by a “learned ignorance,” a “not-
knowing” that draws the soul “into amazement and keeps her on the hunt,
for she clearly recognizes ‘that he is,’ but she does not know ‘what’ or ‘how’
he is.”50 On this level the created self vanishes so that it is no longer “I” who
thinks, sees, or loves, but God who knows, sees, and loves. Rather, as Eckhart
says in several sermons, “The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which
God sees me.”51
One of Eckhart’s keenest readers, Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1461), went on to
explore the nature of God as “not-other,” and even wrote a treatise on this ap-
proach to the divine mystery in his last years. In this context, however, it is not
Cusa’s The Not-Other (De Non-Aliud) that I wish to look at, but the Cardi-
nal’s mystical masterpiece, the treatise On the Vision of God (De visione dei).52
Cusa was moved to write this work because of a quarrel over the relation of
love and knowledge in the ascent to God, more specifically in the Dionysian
writings, the traditional textbook of mystical theology. The Carthusian Vin-
cent of Aggsbach had attacked Cusa for teaching that both love and knowl-
edge played important roles in the path to union, insisting that the Dionysian
writings demonstrated that in true mystical theology (although not in the
lower stages of contemplation) intellect must be discarded so that God may be
attained in the apex affectus. Cusa sent several letters to his friends in the mon-
astery at Tegernsee who had become caught up in the debate, explaining that
both love and knowledge played necessary roles. “In every love by which a
person is carried into God,” Cusa says, “knowledge enters in, although it does
SPIRITUS | 8.1
rapture in the garden of paradise. In Chapter 17, Cusa, speaking in the voice
of a monastic contemplative, declares: “I perceive that the distinction between
the one who loves and the lovable exists inside the wall of the coincidence of
unity and otherness. . . . For the wall shuts out the power of every intellect,
although the eye looks beyond into paradise. Yet that which the eye sees it
can neither name nor understand, for what it sees is the eye’s secret love and
a hidden treasure, which remains hidden after it is found. . .”55 So, love does
indeed go beyond knowledge, though Cusa takes care to underline that both
are necessary. Late in the treatise he summarizes his position in the language of
prayer: “O Christ, our Savior, you have taught two things only: faith and love.
By faith the intellect approaches the Word; by love it is united to it. The nearer 57
the intellect approaches, the more it is given increase in power; the more it
loves, the more it is established in the light of the Word.”56
John of the Cross (d. 1591) also reflected deeply on the role of knowing
and loving in the path to union with God, specifically on the way in which the
faculties of memory, understanding, and will are transformed through the puri-
fying, illuminating, and unifying power of mystical grace.57 John’s examination
of how the thinking and loving subject attains union with God at first glance
appears dualistic in the way in which he separates the sensual from the spiri-
tual aspects of the soul and constructs two different accounts of knowing and
loving. He insists that the knowing that begins in the physical senses and pro-
duces natural knowledge of and love for created realities through the activa-
SPIRITUS | 8.1
between the three faculties and the substance of the soul. The substance is not
some fourth, deeper, aspect of the human subject as imago Dei, but mirrors the
relation between the three persons of the Trinity and the Godhead. As Edward
Howells puts it, “The three faculties are distinct from the substance of the soul
while also, on a deeper level, unified in this subsistence.”62 The trinitarian basis
of John’s view of mystical consciousness is the root of its Christological dimen-
sion—the union of the divine and human natures in the person of the Word
is both the exemplar and source for how the mystic unifies the divine way of
knowing and loving present in the “center of the soul” (John’s equivalent of
Eckhart’s grunt, or ground) and the ordinary human knowing and loving that
the mystic must still employ in daily life, but now in a transformed fashion.63 59
The key is that “The soul’s center is God,” as John says in the Living Flame of
Love.64 The more that the soul penetrates into the center, the more its activ-
ity becomes a divine activity; nevertheless, John always insists that the soul
remains a created reality. While John can sometimes echo Eckhart’s and Cusa’s
strong formulations of identity, that is, the operative fusion of divine and hu-
man activities in mystical consciousness, he is more attentive to the importance
of ongoing distinction than Eckhart was, and also perhaps than Cusa.
By Way of Conclusion
There is no doubt that explorations of the nature of mystical experience will
continue to be produced by students of different religious traditions and
diverse disciplines. Despite the wide range of understandings given to that
slippery term, many of the treatments centering on experience will be worth
pondering in order to help enrich our understanding of mysticism. The argu-
ment advanced here is that the category of consciousness, embracing experi-
ence but also extending beyond it, may provide a more helpful way of investi-
gating mysticism and its relation to spirituality. This approach seeks to avoid
the danger involved in restricting the “real” mystical element of religion to the
first level of consciousness, that is, the reception of the gift of God’s presence in
feeling, or basic inner experience. It also critiques views of mystical conscious-
ness that tend to emphasize the affective dimension of direct contact with God
to the detriment of the intellective aspect. Both from the theoretical perspective
of consciousness analysis set out in Part I, as well as from a consideration of
the historical evidence of how three significant mystics understood the role of
both knowing and loving in their encounters with God in Part II, the conclu-
sion emerges that a more extensive analysis of the full range of the activities of
the human subject as they are transformed and reoriented through the presence
of God acting directly within the subject will help us gain deeper understand-
ing of the mystical encounter between God and human.
SPIRITUS | 8.1
13. The importance of the category of presence in mysticism was argued by Joseph
Maréchal, S.J., in his Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics (Albany: Magi Books,
1964: French original 1926–37), especially Essay II, “On the Feeling of Presence in
Mystics and Non-Mystics” (55–145).
14. Transformation, a central theme in mystical writings, will not be directly analyzed here.
For a discussion, see Kees Waaijman, “Transformation. A Key Word in Spirituality,”
Studies in Spirituality 8 (1998): 5–37.
15. Thomas Merton, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (New York: New Directions, 1968), 74.
16. Augustine, Confessions, 3.6.
17. Lonergan set out his transcendental method briefly in Method in Theology (New York:
Herder & Herder, 1972), especially Chap. 1. His fundamental work is Insight. A Study
of Human Understanding (London: Longmans, 1957). See also the essay, “Cognitional
Structure,” in Collection. Papers by Bernard Lonergan (New York: Herder & Herder,
1972), 221–39. 61
18. Among these works, see especially James Robertson Price III, The Reintegration of The-
ology and Mysticism. A Dialectical Analysis of Bernard Lonergan’s Theological Method
and the Mystical Experience of Symeon the New Theologian (Chicago: University of
Chicago Ph.D. Dissertation, 1980). Price has also published several essays on mysti-
cism utilizing Lonergan’s thought; see “Lonergan and the Foundation of Contemporary
Mystical Theology,” Lonergan Workshop 5, ed. Fred Lawrence (Chico: Scholars Press,
1985), 163–95; “Typologies and the Cross-Cultural Analysis of Mysticism,” in Religion
and Culture: Essays in Honor of Bernard Lonergan, S.J., ed. Timothy P. Fallon, S.J.,
and Philip Boo Riley (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987), 181–90; and “Transcendence and
Images: The Apophatic and the Kataphatic Revisited,” Studies in Formative Spirituality
11 (1990): 195–201.
19. Lonergan at times speaks of consciousness as “just experience” (Method, 106), but
because his theory insists that the operations of understanding, judging, and deciding
are also conscious activities whose self-presence can be objectified by “applying the
operations as intentional to the operations as conscious” (Method, 9–15), I will use
consciousness in this wider sense here. Important for understanding Lonergan’s view of
consciousness is his distinction between the objectivist view of “consciousness as per-
ception” and his own insistence on “consciousness as experience,” that is, self-presence.
See his De constitutione Christi ontologica et psychologica (Rome: Gregorian Univer-
sity, 1959), 130–34; and the essay “Christ as Subject: A Reply,” in Collection, 175–78.
20. Bernard Lonergan, The Philosophy of God and Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster,
1973), 13 (see also 61–62).
21. Lonergan, Method, xii, and 18–20.
22. In Chapter XIX of Insight Lonergan developed this co-presence of primary Intelligibil-
ity and Being in human intentionality as an argument for the existence of God. In later
works he admitted that this “proof” depended on religious conversion and was there-
fore not a universal argument for all; see, for example, Logernan, Philosophy of God
and Theology, 11–14.
23. Lonergan, Method, 104–07, 111–13, and 122–23; and Lonergan, Philosophy of God
and Theology, 8–10.
24. Lonergan, Method, 107.
25. Lonergan, Philosophy of God and Theology, 38. On the issue of the fifth level, see Mi-
chael Vertin, “Lonergan on Consciousness: Is There a Fifth Level?,” Method. A Journal
in Lonerganian Studies 12 (1994): 1–36.
26. Lonergan, Method, 122–23.
27. Lonergan, Method, 109.
28. Lonergan, Method, 123.
29. The question is reminiscent of the Neoscholastic debates of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries over whether mystical states were intensifications of the grace given
SPIRITUS | 8.1
50. Eckhart, Pr. 101 (DW 4: 360–61).
51. Eckhart, Pr. 12 (DW 1: 201). See also Pr. 76 (DW 3: 320–21); and Eckhart’s Expositio
in Evangelium secundum Iohannem, nn. 506–09 (LW 3: 437–41).
52. For a more detailed investigation of Cusa’s De visione dei, see Bernard McGinn, “Seeing
and Not Seeing. Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei in the History of Western Mysti-
cism,” in Cusanus. The Legacy of Learned Ignorance, ed. Peter J. Casarella (Washing-
ton, DC: Catholic University Press, 2006), 26–53.
53. Nicholas of Cusa, Letter of September 22, 1452, as translated in Bernard McGinn, ed.,
Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism (New York: Random House, 2006), 271. For
more detail on the Tegernsee debates on mysticism, see Bernard McGinn, The Harvest
of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (1300–1500) (New York: Herder & Herder, 2005),
445–56.
54. Nicholas of Cusa, De visione dei, 5.13. For the quotations from this treatise I will use
the translation of H. Lawrence Bond, Nicholas of Cusa. Selected Spiritual Writings 63
(New York: Paulist Press, 1997), where this passage is found on 241.
55. Cusa, De visione dei, 17.75 (trans., 269).
56. Cusa, De visione dei, 24.113 (trans., 286). See also 18.81 and 21.99–100.
57. On mystical transformation in John of the Cross, see especially André Bord, Mémoire et
espérence chez Jean de la Croix (Paris: Beauchesne, 1971); and Edward Howells, John
of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York: Cross-
road, 2002).
58. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, 2.26.5, using the translation of Kieran
Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D., The Collected Works of John of
the Cross (Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1991), where this passage is found on
246–47.
59. For a more detailed account of how this takes place, see Howells, John of the Cross and
Teresa of Avila, 26–34.
60. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, 3.69.
61. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, 3.14.2 (trans., 290).
62. Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, 33.
63. See the analysis in Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, Chapter 3.
64. John of the Cross, Living Flame of Love, 1.12 (trans., 645).