Stoicism vs. Mysticism
From "mindfulness" to contemplation
My new book, Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path of Unknowing, will be released tomorrow. It will bring to an end the holding pattern familiar to authors: the long months between your final corrections of page proofs and the day readers can actually get their hands on the book. This always feels a little isolating for an author—at least for this author. It’s like you put a message in a bottle months ago and you’re waiting to see if anyone receives it on the other side.
This book has been percolating for a long time and changed significantly in the development process (for the better, I think, thanks to the marvelous insights of my editor). It was interesting to look back at my very first draft of the proposal and recall how I initially framed the book’s argument. My pitch was that in an age where a particular ancient school of philosophy—Stoicism—is experiencing a renaissance, we should be considering an alternative form of ancient philosophical counsel to deal with uncertainty: mysticism.
This came back to me yesterday in a lively discussion after my presentation at Trinity Church in NYC. We were talking about the sort of “therapeutic” discipline of the mystical tradition as a way to grapple with fear and anxiety—and how different mysticism’s “prescription” is from Stoicism. Stoicism remains a philosophy of assertion, autonomy, and independence—what Hegel would call a form of self-consciousnessness characterized by mastery. Mysticism, by contrast, is not a mindfulness that masters self but rather a form of contemplation where even contemplation is itself a gift. The mystic (again, per Hegel) finds herself in a radical dependence that is also a liberation.
Ultimately, my book is not an argument with Stoicism. We didn’t let Neo-Stoicism set the tone or play the role of foil. And I think that’s exactly right. But this subtext and implication remains relevant to the book. So I thought it might be interesting to share that earlier frame here as a way to make explicit the implicit, tacit argument with Stoicism that animates my project. Here’s a snippet of that earlier framing:
Ancient Wisdom for Contemporary Life
The sense of dis-ease is familiar, shared, if unarticulated: a feeling that our humanity is at risk, whether by the trauma of environmental apocalypse; the demonizing, dehumanizing forces of fascism and terrorism; the specter of artificial intelligence run amok; or a threat as intimate and proximate as the tiny computers we fondle in our pockets. A character in Don DeLillo’s novel, Zero K, articulates one version of this fear:
Have you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?[1]
Whether the scope is epic or intimate, global or personal, this creeping sense of our humanity being diminished feels like a quintessentially twenty-first problem. And yet a significant response has been the retrieval of a decidedly ancient philosophy. The late modern revival of Stoicism, fostered by Silicon Valley influencers, cognitive-behavioral therapists, and self-help gurus, is a strategy of mindfulness for a world awash in uncertainty and threats—a world that feels out of control.[2] As a response strategy, Stoicism commends a mindful attention to our circumstances and our emotional responses (1) in order to recognize what we control and what we don’t; so we can then (2) aim to achieve apatheia, a tranquility or magnanimity or “greatness of soul” that is the fruit of mindful cultivation of virtue. Thus we might withstand the tumult of a fraught world. We can understand Stoicism’s attraction.
There is, however, a very different ancient school of “mindfulness” that I want to commend as a source for living wisely and well in the maelstrom of the twenty-first century. It is a monastic tradition of mystical contemplation that we should see as a rival form of mindfulness. As a radical alternative to Stoicism, this mystical tradition might have less allure to the moguls of Silicon Valley; and yet I think the mystical tradition holds out more hope for those of us awash in the world they’ve made—and long for a world beyond it.
The contrast with the new Stoicism helps define this mystical tradition of mindfulness (and hence my project). While Stoic mindfulness is attentive to what we don’t or can’t control, it nonetheless remains a strategy of self-control. For the Stoic, all the resources needed to live a magnanimous life already exist within. Mindfulness is the means to discovering one’s own power, in spite of everything.[3] Stoicism remains a philosophy of autonomy and its “good life” is rooted in an egocentrism, or at least self-sufficiency. Again, we can understand its modern appeal.
The monastic contemplative tradition, in contrast, is a form of mindfulness that is attuned to our radical dependency. This dependence makes us vulnerable, but this vulnerability is also what makes us open to a beyond, even hungry for it. The monastic and mystical contemplative tradition is the ek-static alternative to Stoicism’s egocentrism. If the Stoic injunction is to master oneself, the mystical invitation is to lose oneself and thereby be found. If the Stoic telos is self-sufficient magnanimity, the mystical telos is union, communion, nothing less than Love—a form of self-transcendence in which we let go of control in order to find ourselves indwelling a Love at the heart of the cosmos and in communion with the beautiful, mysterious neighbors with whom we call it home. Instead of apatheia, the mystic pursues contemplation for the sake of compassion.
What commends mystic mindfulness—this alternative ancient tradition of contemplation—is also what makes it scandalous to modern sensibilities. Yet it speaks to an enduring, perhaps indelible sense that there “must be something more.” Monastic contemplation recognizes the same challenges that buffet us, but it proceeds from a different starting point and with a different hope rooted in our ek-static nature. The fullness of being human is found in communion with what is outside of myself—both a cosmic dependence on divine Love as well as the social web of friendship and neighbor-hood that suspends us. Mystic contemplation is like a journey of awareness where we step into the dark so that, when just the right light dawns, these webs become illuminated and we see that we are held by Love and made for Love.
The contemplative path to our awareness of this communion is not a puzzle to be solved, as if it was a question of “knowing.” It is not a matter of “understanding.” Here, too, is a scandal to our technocratic sensibilities and our hard-won modern enlightenment. But as the late medieval author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it: “we can’t think our way to God. That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought.”[4] Only when knowledge’s enlightenment dims to darkness can we begin to feel our way to the sort of awareness that is union and communion. So, the author continues, “make your home in this darkness.”[5] Here lies “the dark way that is contemplative knowledge,” a comprehension under which the very name “knowledge” buckles, inadequate.[6] “But the failure of our understanding can help us,” they counsel. “When we reach the end of what we know, that’s where we find God. That’s why St. Dionysius said that the best, most divine knowledge of God is what which is known by not-knowing.”[7] Only in mystic contemplation that ranges beyond my own mastery can I become aware of the mystery of my own being. This is scandalous and humbling because it requires that I let go of what I’m good at, and what modernity has trained me for—thinking—and instead attend to my loves. “No matter how sacred, no thought can ever promise to help you in the work of contemplative prayer, because only love—not knowledge—can help us reach God.”[8] This “dark path” of contemplation opens us, ek-statically, to the irruption of a grace from beyond. “In this way, you transcend yourself, achieving by grace what you can’t on your own.”[9] This is scandalous to both modern, Stoic, and modern Stoic sensibilities.
It is equally scandalous, we should note, to modern and contemporary religious sensibilities. If this monastic, mystical tradition of contemplation is a fitting response to the distractions and dehumanization of late modernity, it is also a necessary means of renewing Christianity itself.
It is perhaps not an accident, then, that at the same time distraction poses an existential and spiritual threat to the fullness of being human, so many forms of modern religion have become an engine for domesticating the divine.[10] Overly confident in their conception of the divine, for example, public forms of Christianity seem to eviscerate mystery. A God that can be conceptually encompassed and comprehended is invoked to carve up the world into a culture war of “us” vs. “them.”
In the face of such distraction and domestication of the divine, we can hear afresh Karl Rahner’s prescient insight: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or will not exist at all.”[11] We might even press the point more radically: if humanity is going to have a future, humans need to cultivate a mystical capacity for wonder. The path to such openness is the path of contemplation.
My book’s argument, in this regard, is twofold. First, I will argue that mystic contemplation is at once an antidote to, and liberation from, distraction and domestication in a way that Stoic mindfulness is not. I will argue that this ancient, monastic tradition of contemplation speaks to more fundamental hungers and yearnings that persist in late modernity. We might be surprised how much mystics give voice to murmuring wonderings in our own so-called “secular” consciousness.
P.S. Next public book tour event is “Arts at the Parish” at Calvary St. George’s in NYC on Saturday, March 28, 6-8pm. Event is FREE: you can register here.
[1] Don DeLillo, Zero K (New York: Scribner, 2016), 239.
[2] See, for example, Massimo Pigliucci, How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life (New York: Basic Books, 2017); Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor: The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2019); William B. Irvine, The Stoic Challenge: A Philosopher’s Guide to Becoming Tougher, Calmer, and More Resilient (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019); and John Sellars, Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live (New York: Penguin, 2020).
[3] It is perhaps unsurprising that Robert Greene, the author of the strangely popular book, The 48 Laws of Power, considers himself a modern Stoic.
[4] The Cloud of Unknowing, with The Book of Privy Counsel, trans. Carmen Acevedo Butcher (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 2009), 21.
[5] Ibid., 12.
[6] Ibid., 87.
[7] Ibid., 156.
[8] Ibid., 28.
[9] Ibid.
[10] The twining of these two realities—the existential threat of distraction and the domestication of the divine—was already discerned by the 17th-century mathematician and philosopher, Blaise Pascal, informed, no doubt, my his own ekstatic, mystical experience on the night of 23 November 1654, memorialized on a scrap of paper he kept near his heart the rest of his life, sown into his vest. It begins with one word: “Fire” (Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings., trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 178). It also includes a protest that informed his furthering thinking: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars.” Elsewhere in his Pensées, Pascal famously and presciently observed “that man’s unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room” (§168 [p. 44]). Distraction reduces human complexity; domestication of the divine reduces God’s mystery.
[11] Karl Rahner, Concern for the Church, vol. 20, Theological Investigations (New York: Herder & Herder, 1981), 149.