The Origins of Christian Mysticism

Original inspiration for Christian mysticism can be found in Plotinus. And at the origin of everything, according to Plotinus, is the One, which has no parts and hence no structure or history: nothing that would allow for an articulate discourse about it (a discourse that has artus, limbs, to it). Of the One we cannot speak, if not in negative terms—to say what it is not: that it has no beginning or end, for example. Given the above, the way in which the One originates everything cannot be creation in any traditional sense: it cannot be any sort of making or doing. What is the case, rather, is that the One emanates into nothingness, or matter, as light emanates in space. The more distant the emanation, the lesser the beings that issue from it; in particular, the more they will be divided, as light reduces to individual, separate flashes. But, crucially, since these beings are flashes of the same light as the One is, they are all the same and all the same as the One: continuity rules; the logic controlling the field is oceanic. And their task is to confirm this nature of theirs by the reverse process of returning to their source, which different later philosophers inspired by Plotinus describe as either more intellectual or more ritualistic. Plotinian philosophy, later called Neoplatonism, connects with Christianity in an author that was for a long time thought to be a near-contemporary of Jesus himself, though he was eventually assigned to the fifth/sixth centuries and is now known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. In the Dionysian corpus the Plotinian One is relabeled God, and much the same is true of him as in Plotinus: he has no definite qualities, nothing positive can be said of him, and everything comes from him in the form of emanation. An impressive intermediate stage between these early developments and later Christian mysticism is the powerful figure of Scotus Eriugena, of the ninth century. In him chickens come home to roost: if everything is ultimately unitary and humans will eventually be reunited with God, how can we account for the eternity of punishment in hell? Scotus launches this provocation and then tries to fudge it, which will not prevent the Church from forbidding the circulation and reading of his books.