Unveiling Veils of Infinitivity: Apophasis and Envisioning the Invisible in the Study of Mysticism
The following Research Reflection, by Elliot R. Wolfson, Visiting Scholar, is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
Two of the most complicated theoretical topics confronting the scholar of mysticism are apophasis and infinity. Writing about apophasis presents a unique dilemma as the term itself connotes the inability of language to name the ultimate reality that is nameless. Technically speaking, however, the apophatic is a gesture of speaking-not, which entails saying the unsayable, as opposed to not speaking, which is the reticence appropriate to a vow of silence. The exploration of infinity presents an equally daunting demand as the brain is summoned to circumscribe the uncircumscribable. Whatever scheme the inquisitive mind proposes to corroborate the contours of infinity, it is always at an infinite distance from the goal it seeks to achieve. Just as communicating the incommunicable is endless, since there is no end to speaking about what cannot be spoken, so the effort to map infinity is unrelenting, inasmuch as there is no limit to delimiting what cannot be delimited.
From the diverse methodologies of mathematical and scientific theories of the infinite, one can deduce validation for the archaic esoteric wisdom that there is no representation of the unrepresentable that is not a misrepresentation, and hence, truth may be unveiled only through the veil of untruth. The investigation of apophasis and infinity mandates a displacement of the traditional binary logic—A is either P or not P, but not both P and not P at the same time and in the same relationship. If the nature of infinity must be pushed backward endlessly by the human mind in its unyielding dissection of finiteness—a completed infinite is logically impossible—then there is no end to envision that is not always, and therefore, never ending.
From postmodernism, we have learned that god and the devil still reside in the details. In the current academic environment, we are hypersensitive to the peril of offering generalizations that would compromise the intricacies of the particular. Recourse to transcendental truths or metaphysical absolutes is considered essentializing and totalizing, and thus, attentiveness to granularity alone is justified. To use a kabbalistic trope, in an age inundated by heterogeneity and disjointedness, all we have are fragments of broken vessels. But even this metaphor must be modified. In contradistinction to the kabbalists, we do not readily accept that the fragments originate from or may be reassembled into a retrievable aggregate. Ever mindful of the limits of our analytical categories, conceptual framings, and synthetic reconstructions, what we can lay claim to, at best, are fragments of a fragmentation that cannot be rendered whole, the breaking of a brokenness that cannot be unbroken. Indeed, the challenge before us is not the dread of meaninglessness but the terror of a surplus of meaning for which we could never give an adequate reckoning and that doggedly leaves us in a condition of acatalepsy. The better part of valor, accordingly, should summon humility and the aporetic suspension of certitude on the part of the scholar.
The study of mysticism presents an additional complication insofar as the experiences investigated under this rubric are typically thought to deal with matters difficult, if not impossible, to classify and to analyze on account of their ineffability and inscrutability. Like many other scholars of my generation, I reject the assumption that we can posit a rigid definition of mysticism, an essence that would be applied unqualifyingly, insisting instead that any taxonomy of this phenomenon must be gauged from the perspective of socio-cultural and historical context, allocating precedence to the inimitability of the singular. Nevertheless, insofar as heterogeneity is discernible only against the backdrop of homogeneity—a point confirmed by the neuroscientific assumption that humans could not recognize experiential disparity without postulating ideational uniformity—it remains theoreti-cally warranted and heuristically viable to ponder the sundry iterations of the mystical by identifying recurring patterns of thought that cohere in unified systems of multidimensional meaning. Like DNA, these patterns generate new molecular constellations in an apparently ceaseless cycle of succession, while the systems provide the relatively stable frameworks through and in which those fluctuating cellular configurations evolve, dissolve, and revolve.
A sustainable comparative approach is one that presumes similarity but is respectful of diversity. By digging into the soil of one tradition, one inevitably finds the pathway that leads to other traditions. On this score, mysticism is the path that transcends the path and thereby provides the very conditions for there to be a path that is transcended. The prospect of finding common ground—the shared space demarcated by difference of identity as opposed to identity of difference—is not vindicated by presupposing the existence of an immutable truth but by unearthing a mutable truth from the potential for dialogue lodged in the crevices between traditions where similitude and dissimilitude appear in the convergence of their divergence.