Methods in the Study of Esotericism, Part II

Mysticism and the Study of Esotericism

Arthur Versluis

Michigan State University

 

   In the companion article to this one, I outlined the major current approaches to the study of
esotericism, and proposed what I term “sympathetic empiricism” as the approach that I find
most amenable.  This is the approach that I used in my trilogy of books on Christian theosophy,
beginning with Theosophia  (1994), Wisdom's Children (1999) and Wisdom's Book  (2000). 
While I am convinced of the critical importance of historiography in the study of esotericism
(and for this reason all of my academic books are firmly grounded in historical method) I do
not believe that historiography is adequate in itself to convey the complex, multivalent nature
of esoteric thought, traditions, or most of all, experience.  Esotericism, given all its varied
forms and its inherently multidimensional nature, cannot be conveyed without going beyond
purely historical information: at minimum, the study of esotericism, and in particular
mysticism, requires some degree of imaginative participation in what one is studying.

Remarks on the Study of the Esoteric

   Let me begin by sorting out at least some terms, an operation particularly important when
working with terms as slippery as “esotericism” and “mysticism.”  The first of these was
defined in the following way by the Association for the Study of Esotericism [ASE], a new
academic organization founded on 1 May, 2002:

The word “esoteric” derives from the Greek esoterikos, derived from esotero, comparative of
eso, meaning “within.”  Although its first known mention in Greek is in Lucian’s ascription to
Aristotle of having “esoteric” [inner] and “exoteric” [outer] teachings, the word later came to
designate the secret doctrines said to have been taught by Pythagoras to a select group of
disciples.  In this context, the word was brought into English in 1655 by Stanley in his History
of Philosophy. 
Esotericism, as a field of academic study, refers to alternative, marginalized, or dissident
religious movements or philosophies whose proponents in general distinguish their beliefs,
practices, and experiences from public, institutionalized religious traditions.  Among areas of
investigation in the field of esotericism are alchemy, astrology, Gnosticism, Hermeticism,
Kabbalah, magic, mysticism, Neoplatonism, many new religious movements, nineteenth,
twentieth, and twenty-first century occult movements, Rosicrucianism, secret societies, and
theosophy. [1]

This is a functional definition: what is esoteric is inner, hidden from outsiders, non-public, and
in this context, associated with secret or semi-secret spiritual teachings. 

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   Given this functional definition of esotericism, we can see that mysticism falls naturally
within it.  Indeed, one could well argue that mysticism represents the purest form of
esotericism, in that  mystical experience is inherently esoteric, that is, an inner dimension of
religious experience clearly distinguished from ritual or institutional religious practice even if
the mystic endorses and draws upon the latter.  Mysticism is, then, in this definition a subset of
esotericism; mysticism is by its very nature esoteric.  In the model that I outlined in part one of
this article, esotericism has as its central characteristic gnosis, meaning experiential insight
into the nature of the divine as manifested in the individual and in the cosmos.  Gnosis may be
divided into two broad categories: cosmological, and metaphysical or transcendent.. These are
not, however, mutually exclusive but rather complementary and overlapping.  Cosmological
gnosis is insight into the nature of the cosmos; examples of it include alchemy, astrology,
magic, even if these also include metaphysical gnosis.  Metaphysical gnosis in its pure form is
apophatic or via negativa mysticism like that of Meister Eckhart or Marguerite Porete; it can
be described also as the transcendence of subject-object or self-other divisions.

  From these remarks so far, we can see that roughly speaking, visionary mysticism like that of
Hildegard of Bingen or even more clearly, Jane Leade, corresponds to  cosmological gnosis;
apophatic mysticism like that in The Cloud of Unknowing corresponds to transcendent gnosis. 
In cosmological gnosis, a  self-other dichotomy continues to exist—the visionary unites with
and yet remains distinct from Christ—whereas in transcendent gnosis, the self-other
distinction vanishes in the process of spiritual realization.  Naturally, this distinction is only
indicative: for example, Jacob Böhme's work is famously visionary and cosmological, but also
includes and, I have argued, has at its center an apophatic mysticism of the Ungrund[2] 
Böhme's work exemplifies both categories, as in fact does the work of John Pordage and many
other theosophers, to a greater or lesser degree.[3]  But in any case, mysticism represents
direct experiential individual gnostic insight into the nature of the cosmos and of the divine.

   Although there are a wide variety of models for interpretation now available, they all give
rise to a fundamental question concerning mysticism: is mystical experience a construct of the
mystic, or is it as Eliade argued, an irreducible realization of  transconsciousness?  Stephen
Katz, with his argument that mysticism must be studied as a function of language, is in effect
arguing that mystical experience is a construct of the mystic, that is, a socio-linguistic
construct.  In this view, one cannot separate mysticism from language, and this perspective in
a period of about two decades at the end of the twentieth century, under the influence of
French deconstructionism, became a dogmatic formulation, as when Don Cupitt in his
Mysticism after Modernity asserted that “There is no such thing as ‘experience’ outside of and
prior to language. . . . Language goes all the way down.  Language doesn’t copy or convey
experience; language determines or forms experience as such. . . . Writing is redemption . . .
Mysticism is mystical writing: that is, it is writing and only writing that reconciles conflicting
forces and turns suffering into happiness.”[4]  This is quite a claim.

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   I will say forthrightly here that I find this claim entirely unconvincing when applied in such
a dogmatic and nuance-free fashion, even if as a writer and erstwhile literary scholar I find it
somewhat tempting, rather like a chocolate niblet that turns out to be a laxative pill.  Attractive
though such assertions might seem, they have unfortunate consequences when ingested. 
What we have here is a false syllogism: some mystics write, therefore mysticism consists only
in writing.  The problem here is this: that it makes mystical experience itself literary, and this
goes counter to what we find in the actual writings of mystics like Eckhart, Jacob Böhme, or, to
use twentieth-century examples, Franklin Fowler-Wolff or Bernadette Roberts.  It is clear in
every case that they are not insisting on the redemptive power of the fact that they have
written this or that down—rather, they are seeking to convey in writing a  transformative
process that they have undergone.  This is important because if one accepts the notion that
mysticism is fundamentally a linguistic phenomenon, one then is ignoring what someone like
Roberts explicitly writes, that her writing is a record of her spiritual experiences, and in fact
the logical conclusion of this ignorance is that one jettisons the fact that there is a mystical
phenomenon here at all.  One is left with only the writing, as if it were not at all what its author
writes of it, a record of an inner process, but rather only an object.

   So let me say outright that for our purposes here, we must acknowledge that there is a
phenomenon to be considered that is not merely a written  object— rather, ‘behind’ the
written work is a  mystical phenomenon in itself that the mystic experienced.[5]  When John
Pordage, or  Jane Leade, or Bernadette Roberts write that their work is an effort to convey
what they have experienced, it seems to me self-evident that barring evidence to the contrary,
we should accept that there is a phenomenon, an experiential process that they underwent
and of which their written work is a manifestation, a  sign, not the thing-in-itself.  The same is
true, by the way, albeit much more problematically so, in alchemical treatises.  It seems to me
very clear that alchemical treatises explicitly point toward (even if they also disguise)
alchemical processes of various kinds: here too, the written word’s not the only thing.  It
strikes me as a bit strange that one feels it necessary to assert the obvious, but so it is.

   Why? When we look at the extremes that various methodologies produce in this field, we can
see the answer more clearly.  Let me offer two examples.  First, a strictly historiographic
approach that seeks only to trace lines of influence may turn into a total denial of the religious
phenomenon itself; historiography can become an attribution of Jacob Böhme’s work, say,
largely or entirely to historical predecessors, and an ignoring of the actual work itself as a
manifestation of Böhme’s own inspiration.[6]  Even worse, however, are the ideological or
hypertheoretical abuses to which mystics can be subjected.  Here too, an example: Eric
Voegelin has made commonplace in some political circles the notion that “gnosticism” or
“gnosis” is somehow the origin of all that is evil in modernity and especially of totalitarianism.
[7]  This belief of Voegelin’s has given rise to a bizarre form of ideological misinterpretation of
mysticism and of the esoteric more generally, and eventually—under the influence of the so-
called “linguistic turn” of French literary theory— has given rise to hypertheoretical works like
those of Cyril O’Regan, which turn the works of mystics like Böhme into totally abstract objects
evidently useful for constructing one’s own jargon-based linguistic system, but totally divorced
from the actual phenomenon of mysticism.[8]

 
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Imaginative Participation

   Yet if we acknowledge what is to me obvious, that there is a mystical process or set of

experiences ‘behind’ what we read, this makes our work as scholars considerably more
difficult.  If everything is merely “text,” well then we need only play with it or analyze it as
text.  A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse.  But it quickly becomes clear to those with
eyes to see that when we look at the field of esotericism, we are dealing with very complex
currents of thought and kinds of experiences that do not always conform at all to
contemporary perspectives.  What are we to make of Böhme’s immensely complex and often
circular expression of a visionary cosmology deeply indebted to alchemy and astrology?  What
are we to make of Pordage’s visionary journeys into spiritual realms, or of Fowler-Wolff’s
accounts of absolute transcendence?  Here I would answer: as much as possible, we should
seek to avoid making much of their accounts, and instead concentrate on seeking to
imaginatively understand them on their own terms.

   Here I’m arguing that in the study of esotericism more generally, and specifically in the field
of mysticism, it is essential for scholars to engage at minimum in a process of imaginative
participation.  Sympathetic empiricism represents a middle ground between historiographic
objectification on the one hand, and phenomenological subjectification on the other. 
Sympathetic empiricism means that one seeks, as much as possible, to enter into and
understand the phenomenon one is studying from the inside out.  The further removed
historically that one is from such a religious phenomenon, the more valuable historiography is
in recreating context, but without a sympathetic approach, in the field of esotericism,
misunderstanding and reductionism become inevitable.
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   Let me offer an example.  One of the clearest alchemical treatises I have ever seen is John
Pordage’s “Letter on the Philosophic Stone.”  In it, he outlines a process of spiritual alchemy
that although it is indebted to a similar process found in Jacob Böhme’s writing, is very much
his own.  One could approach the contents of this letter from a variety of perspectives, and in
fact once I translated it back into English, I did exactly that: I shared it in a discussion group
with two prominent physicists, a scholar of alchemy, and a prominent Jungian analyst, among
others.  One of the physicists sought to approach it from a perspective of contemporary
physics; the scholar of alchemy approached it as merely another example of many such works;
and the Jungian scholar converted it into a treatise on Jungian psychology.  All of them did
shed light on the work, but were any of these approaches to become dominant in an
interpretation of it, the treatise would have been lost in translation, obscured by or subsumed
entirely into the method of approach.

   All scholarship, after all, is a kind of translation.  To translate a work, one has to do more
than simply convey the literal meaning of what is there, even though the literal meaning is of
course important.  But in a good translation, there is something more: the translator enters
into the work itself through translating it.  There is something mysterious about this process; it
is a kind of shared consciousness through the medium of written language.  This process takes
place in literary translation, but it is even more evident in esoteric works that were written
precisely in order to share a particular dimension of consciousness or process of inner
awakening. 

   In fact, in a forthcoming book entitled Restoring Paradise: Western Esotericism, Literature,

and Consciousness, I analyze precisely this literary and spiritual dimension of Western esoteric
traditions, and argue that from antiquity through the present, one finds recurrent the theme of
esoteric transmission through the written word.  Exemplary of this initiatory dimension of the
written word is the work of O.V. de Lubicz Milosz, which is explicitly devoted to conveying
Milosz’s esoteric realizations to a future student or, more precisely, disciple.  In other words,
writing can function as a form of initiatory transmission, and in fact does so quite often in the
West.  In this respect, the writing isn’t identical with the mystical experience, but rather is a
medium intended by the author to awaken similar experiences in a reader.

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A Case Study: Bernadette Roberts

   When we look at the work of Bernadette Roberts (1931-), we can see that her work also
represents a kind of initiatory transmission through writing.  Bernadette Roberts’s work
reveals a perspective in many respects akin to that of Franklin Fowler Wolff.    Both twentieth-
century authors spent much of their lives in California, Wolff eventually in retreat in the
mountains, Roberts in a California suburb.  Both authors followed essentially solitary paths
and though they looked for assistance in existing traditions, both were determined to follow
their own experiential realizations as being most the most vital path for themselves.  Like
Wolff, Roberts, although Roman Catholic, is non-sectarian in her approach; like Wolff, her
account is autobiographic and lays great emphasis on her experiences of spiritual realization. 
Both authors’ writings take the form of a spiritual journal, and both had to grapple with
realizations far beyond what they expected to encounter.  What is more, both authors came to
a fundamental realization about the nature of consciousness and about the nature of self that
informs everything that they subsequently wrote.   So parallel are their writings in these
respects that one could well speak of them as representing the clearest examples of a
twentieth-century American contemplative tradition.

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   But all of these parallels should not obscure the uniqueness of Roberts’s spiritual experiences
and writing.  Her two autobiographic books—The Path to No-self, and The Experience of No-self
—are undoubtedly her best-known works, and it is important to draw on them.  But it is in a
much lesser-known book entitled What is Self? A Study of the Spiritual Journey In Terms of
Consciousness that Roberts’s spiritual life and experience is most lucidly and concisely
outlined.  In What is Self?, Roberts grapples with the intellectual consequences of her most
profound realization, implied in the titles of all of her books: that despite our familiar illusions
about the solidity of our own egos, in fact self does not exist.  The experience of no-self, the
truth that there is ultimately no ego, is what Roberts recognizes as the central truth of Christ’s
own experience.  It is what is signified in Christ’s lament: “Father, why hast thou forsaken
me?” There is, Roberts realized, no more powerful and transformative truth at the center of
Christianity than the realization of no-self, the complete transcendence of ego.

   As is evident from her life story, Roberts was a born gnostic.  Her first gnostic realization
came at the age of five, she relates, when she had “an overwhelming experience.  From within
there is a sudden infusion of tremendous power,” which she likened to what a balloon might
feel when it is suddenly inflated (WS 168).  She went about asking others if this mysterious
power affected them in the same way, but no one knew what she was talking about, and she
soon learned not to mention it and even to be skeptical of such a experiences, a skepticism that
she retained throughout her life.  Indeed, she later wrote that she has often thought that such
skepticism is a kind of prerequisite for such experiences in that they may well prove to be
misleading unless one retains a certain detachment from them.  This mysterious power stayed
with her for four years, and then when she was nine, it withdrew.  But she realized, by the age
of eleven, that she had a spiritual destiny and that what most people called a “self” was of no
consequence whatever to the inner power that she felt within her.

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   Roberts was born into an unusual situation in that her father was a devout religious man
with an immense knowledge of Roman Catholicism and a large library.  She and her father had
numerous long conversations about Christianity, and it is clear that she had a powerful and
independent mind, not satisfied by platitudes and received verities.  Roberts had little faith in
the doctrine of vicarious atonement, and she went through various crises of belief in which
she found it necessary to take stock of what she could believe and what she could not accept
within received Catholic doctrines.  She brought these questions to her father, and he replied
that most important was “practice, practice, practice” of the faith.  This answer comforted her
enormously, and she went on to heed those words and to delve deeper and deeper into the
mysteries of Christianity. 

   Roberts went very far indeed into the mysteries of Christianity, much farther than most
Christians would dream of.  But it is no doubt best to quote her directly, not least to give the
flavor of her writing and of its detached, deeply personal and yet impersonal quality.  In What
is Self? she writes of a “fine line,” “which is a line between the divine and the last vestige of
self-awareness which, in the unitive state, is equally awareness of the divine.” Crossing this
line, Roberts maintains, “is not in the books,” “nor can anyone know ahead of time what lies
beyond this line because the line is the boundary of consciousness beyond which
consciousness cannot go.” What is more, “the moment the line dissolves is unknown; it
happens in great stillness and is not an experience.  No event could be less spectacular or more
momentous.” “What characterizes the unitive state is the love, charity, and compassion of
egoless giving and living, but what characterizes the no-self condition is knowledge of the
ultimate Truth as it lies beyond all self; this is its sole purpose, revelation, and concern” (WS
186). 

   And there is more.  For “About a week after the line dissolved, when the mind deliberately
tried to look within, instantly the divine Center (the living flame) quietly exploded and
vanished.” “After this it is never again possible to look within; not only will the mind no longer
function in this reflexive manner, but without a Center there is no “within” any more.  And
without a ‘within’ there is no vessel to experience any emptiness; simply put, there is nothing
left to BE empty” (WS 187).  Roberts’s account is eerily absent the usual sense of “I” and “other”
precisely because nondualism is what she is trying to convey through language pervaded by
exactly this dualism.  To overcome the dualism, her language becomes passive, or refers to
“the mind,” rather than to “I”.  But it is clear in any case that she is conveying a journey on
which, precisely when she has reached a turning point that appears to be a “final state,” that
state turns out to be a relative realization that itself is later transcended.  One has always a
sense that more is coming, that she is amidst a continuous process of realization, going further
and further.

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   Particularly interesting is Roberts’s understanding of Christ’s mission in the world, which she
delineates in no uncertain terms because her understanding of Christ emerges out of her own
direct spiritual experience.  Roberts writes, in The Path to No-self, that “I see Christ first and
foremost as a mystic who had the continuous vision of God and whose mission was to share it,
give it to others.  Few people see it this way; instead, they exploited Christ’s good works to
justify their own busy lives, lives without interior vision and therefore lives without Christ”
(124).  Performing our responsibilities as human beings, lending a helping hand, these are
simply “what it means to be human; there is nothing particularly Christian about it.” She
describes the gnostic experience of Christ as that of an inner flame that one cannot adequately
express or convey to others, that one cannot use for one’s own ends, but that “has another
purpose altogether, which is to burn [one] out through one’s very inability to express it.  It is as
if the flame wears down the self through the self’s continual search for the flame’s adequate
expression or manifestation” (126).  The experience of the inner flame and of selflessness, the
life of interior vision, these are not ancillary, but in fact are what it means to follow Christ’s
path.

   It is relatively easy to perceive the journeys and experiences of Roberts as pointing toward a
particular enduring state of consciousness, a goal toward which one is striving.  But it is clear
from her writings that although she certainly passed various “milestones” in realization, her
contemplative practices were not static but dynamic, not frozen but living.  In Path to No-self,
Roberts includes some of her verbatim journal entries, among them those referring to her
realization of what it means to die to oneself and to have Christ living within one.  Her journal
entries have an immediacy that the prose of her books do not; and she writes that she confides
in her journal because she has no one with whom to share her experiences, no one to whom
she could pass on the flame or to whom she could convey this new terrain she was traversing. 
In fact, in her next book, The Experience of No-self, she writes of “how it seems contemplative
authors take for granted that the more advanced soul goes no further when its interior life
burst into a flame of love, and remains that way for the rest of its life—as if this were the end. 
Actually, it is only another beginning” (127).  And this dynamic journey, because it is unique for
each individual, is difficult if not impossible to truly share.

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   Yet the journey through no-self that Roberts experienced, she tells us, is actually a journey
that we are all destined to experience, for it is a fundamental part of growing old and dying. 
Near the conclusion of The Experience of No-self, Roberts tells of how she told an elderly friend
of hers named Lucille of her experience of no self.  Lucille thought Roberts’s revelation quite
amusing, but also was surprised because she herself was also experiencing, at eighty-five, a
gradual dropping-away of self and an entry into the next world.  She thought Roberts too
young to be undergoing this experience, which is a central aspect of aging, but Roberts rejoins
that the contemplative life represents a “speeding up” of natural processes.  And Roberts goes
on to remark that “for those who have eyes to see, there is no place to look where this
Goodness is not revealed.  This is the unquestioned object—indeed, the very subject—of the
contemplative vision.” “To me,” she continues, “the contemplative’s sole function in society is
to shed light on this dimension beyond self and to tell us about the crossing over, which is a
journey few can talk about, but a journey everyone is ultimately destined to make” (203). 

   Roberts’s remark here is quite revealing.  The function of the contemplative or mystic is by
its nature esoteric—for few have had the experience necessary—but “to shed light on this
dimension beyond self” takes place through writing and speaking, no doubt to a limited
audience.  It is not that Roberts has created a sect, though she might have, but rather that
through her writing, she conveys her understanding and experience to what we might term a
self-limited audience.  The writing is there for anyone, but only a comparatively small number
of people will find it attractive; and of those, an even smaller number will presumably
undergo experiences like those she chronicles.  The scholar may or may not undergo
experiences like those of Roberts, but at the very least, the scholar’s function is to do justice to
the subject, and at least to imaginatively participate in the process that Roberts is describing.

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Direct Experience and the Study of the Esoteric

   Yet I will go further.  If the aim of Roberts’s work is to convey to us some sense of this
dimension beyond self, then to genuinely understand her work, one must oneself have
realized at least to a limited extent what she is seeking to convey, or at least imaginatively
participate in her account.  Here I am suggesting what has already been for some time a
debate within the Western academic study of Buddhism: is it ideal for a scholar to have
directly realized the nature of awareness described in a work in order to truly understand it? 
My answer is yes: while it is certainly possible to intellectually understand and even to
vicariously participate in the process of spiritual awakening that Roberts describes, ideal is not
only to read and analyze what she writes, but to undergo oneself the experiences that she
describes.

   This brings us, of course, into an area that makes many scholars uncomfortable.  It is all very
well, one might say, to examine esoteric texts, but when one seeks to experience for oneself
what they describe, that is another matter entirely.  Indeed, the gist of investigation in this field
seems to be going, if in any direction, then in the very opposite one: toward the complete
divorce of the text from the lived experience, and even the denial of the lived experience.  I am
not proposing that one turn the classroom or the scholar’s study into a hive of mystical
experimentation, though that might be an improvement, but I am suggesting that in order to
fully understand what we are studying, there is a point in this field—unlike in the study of
history or literature—at which the practitioner’s expertise takes on more importance than
purely academic knowledge.  While I am not insisting on the necessity of such lived or
experiential understanding in the academic study of works of mysticism like those of Roberts
or in the academic study of alchemical or theosophic works, I am insisting that we must as
scholars keep this door open.  To close it is to insist on the study of such works as mere texts
for our own aggrandizement, and nothing more; it is to close ourselves to understanding what
such works are actually about.

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Summary

   The scholarly study of esotericism is only in its early stages, and as the field develops, I have
no doubt that various kinds of reductionisms will be introduced into it.  One certainly will see
further evidence of the hyperintellectualism that came to pervade literary study in the late
twentieth century, and an insistence that “language goes all the way down” will bring to the
study of esotericism the same kind of hypertheoretical jargon that has infected other fields of
study, notably literature.  What I am arguing here is, at base, this: that an esoteric religious
phenomenon no doubt can become grist for someone’s mill, but approaches that do not keep
foremost in mind fidelity to what one is seeking to understand may reveal much about the
mind of the miller, but little or nothing about the esoteric subject in question (which might
well have been ground into a heap of inconsequential dust).

   The study of esotericism in general, and the study of mysticism in particular, are in fact
frequently the study of changes in consciousness, and as such call us more than any other area
of academic study to retain openness of mind and at minimum imaginative participation in
our subject.  Historical awareness and a soberness of mind leavened with healthy skepticism
and a touch of humor are important, but arguably most important of all for the scholar of
esotericism is a capacity for sympathetically entering into and presenting ways of
understanding humanity and the world that are often fundamentally different than those in
the “mainstream.”  The time for the kind of rationalist cataloguing of “superstitious errors of
the past” on the order of Thorndike is long past, but other dangers still remain, ranging from
gullible naïveté on the one extreme, and hyperintellectual objectification on the other.

   In the end, fidelity to one’s subject remains the surest touchstone.  What is one’s motivation
in writing about alchemy, or Christian theosophy, or the mysticism of Bernadette Roberts?  The
best scholarship is that which makes new means of understanding the world available to us in
ways that correspond both to their own era and to our own.  The work of a scholar like Henry
Corbin  remains as living and stimulating today as when it was written because it not only
brings us into hitherto unknown regions of Islamic mysticism, but also offers a bridge between
those regions and our own world, our own time.  The best scholarship is an act of creative
discovery, and no field in contemporary scholarship is more suited to creative discovery than
that of esotericism.  One cannot but look forward with a sense of anticipation for what is to
come, for there remain whole worlds and worldviews yet to be discovered; for we have only
begun to investigate what remains the largest body of unexamined work in all of the
humanities.  But as the field develops, let us be sure to keep in mind that in the study of
consciousness, while direct realization for oneself of a described experience is no doubt best,
historical knowledge, imaginative participation and fidelity to our subject remain the surest
ways not to go too far astray.

  -39-

Bibliography

Don Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity, (London: Blackwell, 1998)

Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Apocalypse: Jacob Boehme’s Haunted Narrative, (Albany: SUNY, 2002)

___, Gnostic Return in Modernity, (Albany: SUNY, 2001)

Paul Ricoeur, E. Buchanan, trs., The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper, 1967)

Bernadette Roberts, The Experience of No-Self, (Albany: SUNY, 1993)

 ___, The Path to No-Self, (Albany: SUNY, 1991)

___, What is Self? (Austin: M. B. Goens, 1989)

Arthur Versluis,  “Methods in the Study of Esotericism,” Part I, Esoterica IV(2002): 1-15.

___, “The Mystery of the Ungrund,” Studies in Spirituality (11(2001): 205-211.

___, Restoring Paradise: Esoteric Transmission Through Literature and Art, (Albany: SUNY, 2003)

___, Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity  (Hudson: Lindisfarne, 1994),

___, Wisdom's Children: A Christian Esoteric Tradition (Albany: SUNY, 1999)

___,  Wisdom's Book: The Sophia Anthology  (St. Paul: Paragon House, 2000).

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Endnotes

[1] See the ASE website at http://www.aseweb.org

[2] See Arthur Versluis, “The Mystery of the Ungrund,” Studies in Spirituality (11(2001): 205-211

[3] Jane Leade, for example, is almost exclusively visionary, and so is the work of her
followers, like Ann Bathurst.  Franz von Baader's voluminous and highly intellectual work, on
the other hand, exhibits almost no trace of the visionary, and in fact he was largely responsible
for rediscovering Meister Eckhart in the nineteenth century, placing him more on the side of
transcendent gnosis even if his work includes much along the lines of cosmological gnosis, i.e.,
insight into the spiritual aspects of nature.

[4] Don Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity, (London: Blackwell, 1998), 74-75.

[5] The word “phenomenological” as we all know, can be used in a wide variety of ways.  In
philosophical language, its use derives from Husserl, but in terms of religious studies it has
taken on a related meaning, that of seeking to understand and to the degree possible realize
and convey the meaning of a religious phenomenon on its own terms, or as it is in itself.  In
Heidegger’s Being and Time, he holds that a phenomenon, and here we are applying this to a
religious phenomenon, is not a product of human consciousness, but is revealed to human
consciousness. Likewise Mircea Eliade, for his part, held that religious phenomena are
ultimately a revelation of what he called the “transconscious”  and are by their nature
irreducible. By contrast, Paul Ricoeur has argued that a  religious phenomenon is a
“constituted given”—that is, it must be constituted or construed by an observer, and that one
must analyze this hermeneutic on multiple levels. See Paul Ricoeur, E. Buchanan, trs., The
Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper, 1967), 10-15, 353.  Here I am using the word along the
lines of Henry Corbin, whose work represents an effort to enter into the perspective about
which he is writing.

[6] See, on this point, my forthcoming article on “Jacob Böhme and the Kabbalah” in a
collection of articles edited by Wouter Hanegraaff and Jan Snoek. 

[7] I analyze Voegelin’s unfortunate confusion concerning “gnosticism” in a forthcoming

article that I hope will help to overcome at least some of the unfortunate, still ramifying
consequences of Voegelin’s error.

[8] See my review of O’Regan’s Gnostic Apocalypse and Gnostic Return in Modernity in the
Journal of the AAR, (Fall, 2003).