Mystical Society

Mystical Society: An Emerging Social Vision by Philip Wexler (Westview Press) a well-known critical theorist with a background in social psychology and a special interest in spirituality examines the revitalization of spirituality manifesting itself in society and specifically in education. Describing what he calls "cultural changes toward the sacred," he documents a cultural shift, brought about by technological and societal changes, toward a new mysticism. Wexler explores the meaning for this new spirituality for our daily lives, for social theory, and for education. From the pervasiveness of a spiritual vernacular to the integration of spiritual practices into our highly individualized and technologized lives, Wexler lays out the evidence for a growing movement, and then draws parallels to periods of mystical revitalization from the past. In the course of this discussion, he draws on the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim.

Philip Wexler's Mystical Society persuasively shows the reader how contemporary social forces associated with spirituality are transforming how Americans become educated, cre­ate relationships and do business. At once erudite and accessible, the book takes us beyond the limits of both modern and postmodern experience into a world in which an increasingly important sense of diffuse spirituality transforms what we think we know and how we think we know it. If you are interested in the new directions in which our economy and religious life are going, you will want to read Mystical Society. Philip Wexler, a well-known critical theorist with a background in social psychology and a special interest in spirituality, examines the revitalization of spir­ituality manifesting itself in society and in education. Describing what he calls "cultural changes toward the sacred," he documents a cultural shift, brought about by technologi­cal and societal changes, toward a new mysticism. Wexler explores the meaning of this new spirituality for our daily lives, for social theory, and for education. From the perva­siveness of a spiritual vernacular to the integration of spiritual practices into our highly individualized and technologized lives, Wexler lays out the evidence for a growing move­ment and then draws parallels to periods of mystical revitalization from the past. In the course of this discussion he draws on the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim, as well as from contemporary social theory.

PHILIP WEXLER is Michael Scanding Professor of Education and Sociology in the Warner Graduate School at the University of Rochester, and he is senior research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His previous books include: Critical Social Psychology, Social Analysis of Education, Becoming Somebody, and Holy Sparks.

Excerpt:

But there is more work to do in bringing these very different conversa­tions and forms of discourse together into a more unified and integrated un­derstanding. It is, surely, a sign of hope that scholars want to do so and that this problematic is of such passionate interest to the contributors to this vol­ume and, we hope, to you, its readers.

In this book, I take the view that a new society is being created within and against the current society. I believe this societal shift is a profound one, although it is still incomplete. However, we can see the shape as well as many of the elements of this emerging society.

I call it a "mystical society" because that is the furthest reach and the fullest expression of the social, cultural, and personal changes that we can already ascertain. This deep change in the way of so­cial life represents a different attitude and understanding of the world, a different cosmology, and a different way of being in the world. It is a reversal, a change of course from the very secularized, instrumental, modern social world. And it is not simply "postmod­ern." I argue that postmodernism is a transitional form, acting as the destructive completion of modernity and as a preface to a soci­ety and culture that is very different from anything that current postmodern preoccupations with culture and identity would recog­nize.

Unlike postmodernism, the new society is not about the power of signs and the pervasiveness of cultural representations. Nor is it about the decentering of the person or the dispersion of meaning. Rather, it is about being and experience, bodiliness and transcendence, and ac­cess to very old traditions of religious interpretations as successors to the current hegemony of social scientific languages in the academy and the diluted versions of those in mass culture.

The method and the spirit of this book is interactional. Our story in­cludes continuous interaction-of interpretive traditions and levels of analysis among historic figures and contemporary social processes and, mystically, even across "worlds."

The central interaction, however, is a familiar social scientific one that belongs to the tradition of the sociology of knowledge. In this view, there is an interaction between events in social life and the cat­egories of understanding that we use intellectually to appropriate ex­perienced society. The renewal of esoteric traditions of understand­ing, of making sense of experience, emerges along with and in interaction with the contemporary empirical reality of those mystical experiences. There is a kind of circularity in the interaction between lived experience and systematic interpretation. I try to neither ignore nor wish that away but work it through specifically, in order to show how we are better off with a sometimes circular, interactional view than with a linear, neatly dualistic, and compartmentalized under­standing of the relation between thought and action; being, interpre­tation, and society; culture and social understanding.

The skeleton of the interactional body of the mystical society is that there is a social determination of culture and experience. My criticism of postmodernism, both in the academic and popular dis­course, is that it has hidden the continuing impact of social structure on our lives, in favor of an often inventive analysis of the various me­dia and texts of culture and of academic psychologizing of mass, self-­centered individualism. Cultural studies, on the one hand, and psy­chology and its critics in identity-centered political analyses, on the other, have blocked our vision of the "sociological imagination." We are forgetting the determinative power of organized social life, social structure, and technology to affect not only meaning and identity but also the conditions of experience and, perhaps most importantly, to set the terms for opposing, transforming, and transcending the social present. That is the danger of denying social structure-by textualism in culture and individualism in psychology and identity politics.

Here, however, I depart from the classical sociologists. Religion was the problem, not the solution, for Marx; Weber saw the possibility for a respirited society through a nonescapist innerworldly mysticism but envisioned its realization as only a minor social expression, seen "pi­anissimo" in social life. Durkheim tried to transmogrify the "electric­ity" of religion in order to transubstantiate it into the modem pack­age of scientific, secular individualism.

My hypothesis is that postmodernism induces a variety of forms of noninstitutional religion, of "mysticism," which are at least incipient antidotes to an intensified destruction of being. These forms of cre­ation occur within social terms and express reversals, and perhaps so­lutions, of the basic forms of social destruction. I offer three examples of everyday social mysticism in which we can see "strategies" for go­ing beyond the destruction of self, interaction, and society that con­tinues to characterize social being in our times.

Religion, but mysticism especially, plays a multifaceted role here. I review some of the sociological analyses of postindustrialism and in­formationalism by tracing the outlines of the social structural and technological determination of the conditions for widely shared, however apparently individualized, mystical practice and experience in society. Perhaps less obviously, I also see mystical traditions as the current repository of utopian hope.

Mystical practice and theory contains suppressed alternative forms of life that are at once created and denied by the current organization of social life. Thus mysticism is simultaneously a characterization of a host of emergent social practices and of empirical social life that we see reported in the research studies of W C. Roof and Robert Wuthnow, the theoretical arguments of Dan Merkur, and the very different sorts of critical histories by Lasch and Idel. But it is also the contemporary social unconscious, the place where our socially induced imagination of fearful and hopeful possibilities re­sides. Articulating mystical, esoteric traditions and placing them in interactional relation with sociological explanation and empirical ob­servation is a theoretical work of de-repression.

Mysticism: Analysis and Utopia

In contrast to the repressive desublimation in the sexual revolution foreseen by Herbert Marcuse (1955), I see in mysticism a sublimated de-repression. There is a sublimated social vision, a reality-based envi­sioning of possibility in the mystical, dimly articulated space of the social unconscious, which the depth and rapidity of current social change chums to the surface by grinding its defenses down quickly in the path of instant productivity.

Mysticism is then triply and interactively important: first, as part of an empirical social emergent, belonging to the observed practical re­turn of the sacred to social life; second, as offering access to the terms of interpretive understanding to help make sense of everyday social life; and third, as the locus of social imagination and the sublimation of the forms of life that might be actualized in the social world. When this sublimated vision is reached and the defensive boundaries that protect it are reduced, we have the revitalization and enrichment of individual experience that William James (1910) described as an en­largement of reality, as the lived joy of the "faith-state."

I take all three paths in order to make sense of the interaction be­tween social structure and culture, or the discourses of popular and academic culture, and the character of everyday experience, as best as that can be accessed. I trace these paths, or modalities of the mystical, along the lines of social structure, discourse, and being.

I address the classical mystical concern of the boundary between Self and Other, between the monadic, bounded self and the bound­less, "oceanic" cosmic environment of the universe, by focusing on this boundary and how it changes socially. Instead of the traditional sociological understanding of the individual-society relation through the concepts of self and socialization, I draw at once from the popular experience of the many and different contemporary practices of self work-what Foucault called the "work of the self on the self." This self-work is placed within Eliade's understanding of the performative discourses of primordial religions. I call contemporary versions of this process "reselfing." I show how the self/society boundary works differ­ently now in the mystical society by drawing from the historical an­thropology of religious practice and not primarily on explanations from social science. In that way, I understand the mystical self as end­less ritualized transformation, even to immortality.

If we are like the classical sociologists in caring about social possi­bility and in being critical of the social present, then we ask what sort of analytical social criticism is possible under these altered condi­tions. I look for answers, first in the work of Christopher Lasch and then in the Frankfurt School of critical sociology. Lasch made the connection between social and religious criticism and even, disi­dently, to agnostic form of mysticism. The Frankfurt School's critique of mass culture antedates and sets the tone for both Lasch's and my own dissent from postmodernism and for the effort to historicize the very meaning of social criticism. After the transformative processes of reselfing, there are then the discursive questions of how to appropri­ate the social present critically, not merely taking the present for granted and as inevitable but trying to work toward some more ideal social alternative.

In a mystical society, I suggest, criticism has to be bipolarly recon­textualized: between heaven and earth. Criticism subverts alienated life when it reclaims the petrified body and enlivens and revitalizes being through intellectual work. I ask about the nature of an embod­ied criticism and, beyond that, of the recontextualization of critical understanding, not only when it replaces critical thought within bod­iliness but further recontextualizes it within a cosmic environment. Here social criticism becomes a complement to the apparent silence of classical mysticism and offers a mode of transformative, spiritual, intellectual voice under conditions of a new society. Criticism moves from culture to being.

In addition, social theory demands reconfiguration, especially if we take seriously the tradition of critical social analysis that always places conceptual work within, and not beyond, the bounds of histor­ical time. The classical sociologists are revised throughout the discus­sion, but special attention is paid to Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life and its meaning for individual and social revitalization in a different type of society. Stephen Toulmin's" return to cosmology" provides a clue for a cosmic social analysis. Ioan P Couliano's reconsideration of a premodern, prerepressive Re­naissance gives direction toward a wider screen for social theory; a screen that could include magic, alchemy, and mystery. Theory moves from society to cosmos.

In my view, education is a key locus of transformative social inter­action, or at least another name for it. Nevertheless, institutional ed­ucation has become a major purveyor of feeling-denying contempo­rary cognitive performance obsession, yet another expression of the classical types of alienation and mechanical petrification of individ­ual and social being. Though prefigurations of a mystical, redemptive approach to education  are still scarce, we can at least begin to ask about an education for being. Further, we can question the nature of research into an educational "ethnography of being" against the grain of traditional, critical, and postmodern analyses of school culture.

Although we might see all social interaction as transformative and therefore educational, the work of connecting religion, social interac­tion, and education is only beginning. An important step is to begin describing the practices of everyday mystical social life. I offer such a description, drawing on a variety of mystical traditions. These tradi­tions are now being renewed in an emergent mystical society. Their forms are not classical but eclectic, hybridized and commodified in the contemporary social apparatus. Nevertheless, I see them as impor­tant incipient alternative social forms. That is why I try to make sense of these traditions, although I am a sociologist and neither a sacred nor secular religious scholar. I recognize that religious scholars may be unhappy with my own eclecticism.

Unlike Durkheim, I view the "elementary forms of religious life" as being found in the other-side of religion. This involves the spiritual and esoteric traditions of subterranean and primarily orally transmit­ted traditions of master-disciple mystical knowledge and practice. I try to describe this other type of elementary form in a schema of everyday mysticism. In a discussion of American nature mysticism and William James, Hindu Tantrism, and messianic Hasidism, I see various antidotes to the modem, industrial alienation, mechanical petrification, and anomie diagnosed by modem sociology, as well as to the disorienting, decathecting, and desensitizing destructive moment of postmodernism.

In an earlier empirical study of social emptying and alienation in schools, I identified the absence of interaction, society, and self as the concrete, everyday institutional meaning of a postmod­ern society. Looking at examples of esoteric, mystical traditions, I see reversals of those forms of social emptiness in a new society. As ideal type or schema, each tradition offers creative alternatives to social de­struction and provides the terms for redefining self, society, and inter­action under very different historical conditions-both to modem in­dustrialism and to the premodern social contexts in which they were first elaborated. The practical redefinition that is now occurring also provides clues for a new "mystical sociology."

The mystical society is not fully actualized. Yet, "in front of my opened eyes," I do see new social practices, attitudes, and types of un­derstanding and a new social cosmology. The new society is mystical because it is about the quest for direct experience of the transcenden­tal, the "more," as James put it. It is mystical because it represents the search for a cosmic reality of the "eternal present," as Romain Rol­land labeled it. The new society is mystical because it arises on the grounds of a social process of demedi­ation-the wiping away of cultural and social infrastructures-unin­tentionally instigated by the hyperefficiency of informational social production. Such apparent social destruction of institutions, routines and collective representations-society and culture-that operate be­tween the self and world boundary ironically makes possible an expe­rienced life different from the individualism and alienation of moder­nity or the postmodern symbolic proliferation and cultural density of a "saturated self".

Instead, it invites an immediacy and a revitalization of the capacity for being, which has been the deep utopian subtext of classical sociol­ogy. At the same time, the vitality, joyousness, and experiential en­largement made possible by such immediacy is the hallmark of a mys­tic consciousness and life. Social informationalism and mysticism converge. Where the mystical response to socially induced unboundedness and unification is not deformed into cheap, momentary collec­tive catharsis; where it is neither escapist nor totalitarian; where it is not a sudden, erratic eruption but a continuous, constant state. There emerges a way of being that is inalterably different and irretrievably mystical. Mysticism becomes the experiential cultural foundation of a new society.

Mysticism & Social Transformation edited by Janet Ruffing and Robert J. Egan (Syracuse University Press) How does faith empower its adherents to resist oppression? What are the origins of authentic contemporary mysticism? From the thirteenth-century Franciscan move­ment to African American mystics, this wide-ranging volume of essays con­siders exemplars of Christian mysticism (including Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, the Quakers, and the Society of Friends) whose practices and influence brought about social change. Linking major conceptual issues and social theory, the essays examine the historical impact of mysticism in con­temporary life and argue for a hermeneutical approach to mysticism in its historical context. The contributors look at how mystical empowerment can serve as a catalyst for expressing compassion in acts of justice and long-term social change. We learn how Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, driven by mystical experiences to take up lives of preaching, faced the same misogynistic religious environments as did women mystics throughout his­tory, which has submerges this key area of women's experience. The final two essays describe the development of socially engaged Buddhism in Asia and America and the mystical roots of deep ecology.

Janet K. Ruffing, R.S.M. is professor of spirituality and spiritual direction in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham University. She is author of Uncovering Stories of Faith: Spiritual Direction and Narrative and Spiritual Direction: Bevond the Beginnings as well as more than fifty articles in scholarly and pastoral journals on the historv o£ Christian spirituality, religious life, spiritual direction, mysticism, spiritual lilt, and other topics.

Mysticism & Social Transformation edited by Janet Ruffing and Robert J. Egan (Syracuse University Press) Explores the relationship between the mystical and the political dimensions of religious existence, beginning with the thirteenth-cen­tury Franciscan movement and ending with a feminist approach to the narratives of African Americans who serve in the ministry.

From the thirteenth-century Franciscan movement to African-American mystics, this wide-ranging volume-of essays considers exemplars of Christian mysticism (including Teresa of Avila, Ignatius of Loyola, the Quakers, and the Society of Friends) whose practices and influence brought about social change. Linking major conceptual issues and social theory, the essays examine the historical impact of mysticism in contemporary life and argue for a hermeneutical approach to mysticism in its historical context.

The contributors look at how mystical empowerment can serve as a catalyst for expressing compassion in acts of justice and long-term social change. We learn how Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Cox Jackson, driven by mystical experiences to take up lives of preaching, faced the same misogynistic religious environments as did women mystics throughout history, which has submerged this key area of women's experience. The final two essays describe the development of socially engaged Buddhism in Asia and America and the mystical roots of deep ecology.

JANET K. RUFFING, R.S.M., is professor of spirituality and spiritual direction in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham University. She is author of Uncovering Stories of Faith: Spiritual Direction and Narrative and Spiritual Direction: Beyond the Beginnings.

Mysticism & Social Transformation  excerpt: The catalyst for gathering these essays was a group of papers given at the meet­ing of the American Academy of Religion in 1995. Five papers were presented in the session of the Mysticism Group; they evoked lively responses from the participants and the presenters. When a Syracuse University Press editor ex­pressed some interest in publishing these papers, the idea for this volume was born. The original five papers were interesting and suggestive, but in them­selves did not encompass the breadth of the questions required by the topic even at the time. Invitations to additional contributors well known in their particular fields were issued in three separate rounds in order to treat more of the major questions related to the topic.

Even so, it is with regret that we present this volume without treatments of major non-Christian religious traditions and with no treatment of the topic within third-world liberation theology or of such important contemporary figures in Roman Catholic social thought and action as Thomas Merton or Dorothy Day. Nevertheless, a fine group of essays was collected in the end. The volume is divided into three major sections. Part one offers some cur­rent theoretical perspectives on the main theme of the volume. Grace Jantz­en's work on Marguerite Porete provides a careful political reading of Marguerite's texts that highlights the destabilizing power of mystical writing, perceived in its own day to be so transgressive as to merit Marguerite's execu­tion. Jantzen not only explicates this historical exercise of religious and royal power that effectively silenced a woman who did not fit in the authorized scheme of things, but also contests the contemporary construction of religion that persists in maintaining such a potent warning to women who might dare to speak a truth politically and religiously at odds with established authorities. Dorothee Solle shares with us a new pattern for describing the mystic path, which for her begins in amazement and ends in ongoing resistance. She offers an example in the figure of abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe of this re­constructed pattern of mystical development that assumes the unity of mysti­cism and resistance. This unity includes the "letting go" of false needs and wishes that impede praise and prevent responses of compassion and work for justice in the face of all that is awry.

The middle section of the volume offers a rich presentation of individual Christian mystics or traditions of Christian mysticism, organized in chrono­logical order. Paul Lachance opens the section with a creative treatment of Clare and Francis of Assisi. He restores Clare to her place of significant leader­ship in the Franciscan movement and highlights major aspects of the mystical teaching of both founders and the way their subjective experiences are re­flected in their texts. He traces three major themes in their social practices. The first is poverty as both an inward and outward path related to the relin­quishment of wealth and power and prestige. This joyful practice of poverty, second, leads to a peaceful life, including the capacity for reconciling disputes, and creates a universal brotherhood and sisterhood. Third, Lachance charac­terizes their social message and action as "exemplary"; that is, they communi­cated their vision and purpose through who they were and how they lived rather than through the intentional creation of a social program.

Amy Hollywood's treatment of Meister Eckhart's preaching "as a social practice" relates Eckhart to the Beguine women to whom he preached and by whom he was influenced. She focuses her analysis on Sermon 86, Eckhart's famous reflection on the story of Martha and Mary in which he works out his own distinctive teaching on the relationship of contemplation and action. It is through mystical transformation that the human being "becomes capable of truly just and efficacious activity in the world." Hollywood engages linguistic theory to show that preaching, a particular use and abuse of language, is itself a way of transforming social worlds through its catalytic effects, which engen­der new possibilities for further social transformation that can be enacted by its audiences.

Treatments of two Spanish mystics follow. Carole Slade develops a treat­ment of Teresa of Avila precisely as a social reformer rather than as a purely re­ligious reformer. She shows that Teresa's mystical experience gave her a new identity that required her to act in the world, a practical knowledge of politics that enabled her to work effectively within the established system, and a pro­found understanding of the principles of eternal justice. Slade's treatment of Teresa's use of the Mary Magdalen and Martha of Bethany stories exemplifies the influence of "dangerous memories" carried in a narrative tradition of saints' legends. Slade gives an extensive treatment of Teresa's innovations in relationship to women of "mixed blood" whom she fully integrated into her community.

My own essay on Ignatius of Loyola and Ignatian "service mysticism" is also situated in the Golden Age of Spain. This essay describes a type of mysti­cal path originating in divine initiative and focused on action for the sake of others. Ignatius inspired and gathered a community around himself based on the personal transformation of each man under his spiritual guidance. This Spirit-filled community became a social embodiment of the Catholic reform­ing spirit that multiplied itself many times over through its members' disci­plined and passionate "apostolic" activity. In this essay, Ignatius is paired with a twentieth-century Jesuit, Pedro Arrupe, who demonstrated the vitality of the Ignatian charism in leading a revitalization movement within the Society of Jesus and within a reforming church.

Margaret Benefiel and Rebecca Phipps offer a lively account of two Quak­ers, John Woolman and Catherine Phillips, who exemplify major themes in Quaker practice. The authors highlight the prophetic and charismatic quality of these two figures. Of particular interest is the way in which the Quakers' practical mysticism gave rise to a clear form of social criticism, which they em­bodied in their way of living and in their reasoned tracts. Woolman's con­science led him to radical acts of solidarity with persons he recognized to be in situations of oppression. Phillips was an abolitionist, a prophet who de­nounced economic injustice and poverty, analyzing the economic causes for the poverty she witnessed and offering other women the possibility of an al­ternative social role by her own witness.

This historical section concludes with Joy Bostic's "womanist" treatment of nineteenth-century African American women and their own distinctive re­ligious traditions. She begins with the situation of racism and its strategies of demonarchy, then develops her analysis of the narratives of Black women's spiritual autobiographies to show their strategies of resistance and their trans­formation into radical subjects as a result of their spiritual experience.

The final two essays are grouped around the general theme of emerging contemporary approaches to social transformation. Donald Rothberg's essay on socially engaged Buddhism treats a number of important theoretical issues and describes a contemporary movement in Buddhism intent on supporting social change. Rothberg gives a very clear account of the way the Western philosophical tradition actually created the split that opposed mysticism and the interest in social transformation. He then shows how the emphasis in early Buddhism was primarily on personal transformation through meditation in the context of the monastic sangha rather than on social change through types of social action in the public world. He follows this discussion with an account of the development of an explicitly socially engaged Buddhism in both the East and the West that claims that spiritual and social transformation are not truly separate. His account highlights the development of a meditative tradi­tion through extension of the traditional teaching into a social ethics and practice.

The volume concludes with Roger Gottlieb's thoughtful exposition of the social and mystical dimensions of deep ecology. The first section of the essay reprises many of the definitions and characteristic features of mysticism discussed throughout the volume. Gottlieb recognizes the potential for self-transcendence in mysticism, its presence in most major religions, and its potential for deteriorating into self-deception or escapism. He identifies the paradox of both transcendence and social construction that runs all the way through mystical traditions. He documents the neglected theme of commun­ion with nature in several religious traditions and offers a phenomenological account of deep ecology as a kind of mysticism. With regard to the particular interests of deep ecology, Gottlieb remains critical, social, and political in his assessment of its potential for contributing to social transformation. He evokes the promise that "political solidarity blossoms into a kind of selfless love" at its best: the struggle for justice can yield a joy in service and an expan­sive care that extends beyond the human to the whole family of life that sur­rounds us.

Of course, there is much more work to be done on this topic of mysticism and social transformation. The present social constructions of religion, poli­tics, mysticism, and philosophy have not yet managed to envision mysticism and social transformation together as two sides of one coin or as interrelated aspects of one process. The essays in this volume attempt to vindicate the claim that this interrelationship is possible. Building on the theories, histories, memories, and desires available to us, they try to steady our vision and hope and to illuminate a "way."

 

 

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