Transcending Methodologies: Comparative Mysticism and Textual Affect in Elliot Wolfson's Mystical Hermeneutic

The extraordinary experiences and distinctive literary structure of mystical texts demand a methodological approach that appreciates the complexity of the landscape that mysticism inhabits. Operating on the extreme edges of consciousness, scholars of mysticism have been met with the demands of creating interpretive strategies for comparative analysis that remain attuned to extremity and excess. Historically, these frameworks have been dominated by the warring categories of constructivism and perennialism, each vying for the hegemony of their contextual reference points and epistemological dispositions. While the decades long aftermath of Steven Katz’s “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism” has dissolved this stark binary into a subtle adherence to various forms of the constructivist model, new advancements in the neuroscientific study of mysticism have demanded a reexamination of our historical methodological lineage.[i] The preliminary discovery of unique brain functions operative in mystical states of consciousness has presented a reemergence of the constructivist vs perennialist dilemma regarding the capacity for cross-cultural analysis of mystical texts. Though it may seem outdated, the models of constructivism and perennialism can help us better understand how to approach neuroscientific findings without falling into old dualisms between particularistic and universal readings. Rather than accepting one methodology or the other, the therapeutic approach to a neuroscientific understanding of mysticism places affect as an essential quality of the mystical experience that is frequently overlooked in textual interpretation. This subsequently encourages new scholarly investigation to position affect at the forefront of our study of mystical literature.

By charting the historical trajectory of the academic study of mysticism up through the contemporary intervention of neuroscience, this paper will seek to synthesize constructivist, perennialist, and neurocognitive approaches to the study of mysticism by highlighting the role that affect plays within mystical experiences, mystical literature, and the interpretation of these texts. Using Jeffrey Kripal’s *Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom* as a guide, I aim to uphold Elliot Wolfson’s mystical hermeneutic as a representation of how an affect-based interpretation of mystical texts might operate. Here, according to Kripal’s examination of Wolfson’s *Through a Speculum that Shines*, rather than possessing a piece of mystical literature as an object to be dissected, the re-thinking of these methods calls for the reader to allow themselves to become possessed by the text as a form of hermeneutic engagement. This is not, of course, a call for a pious reading, wherein the distance between text and scholar are dissolved, but requires a kind of distancing that sees the act of reading as a process of “double mirroring, with both text and reader mirroring and giving being to the other,” fostering an experiential intimacy between the text and the scholar.[ii] Scholars are accountable not only for historical literacy, but for an awareness of their positionality as a reader, which, alongside contemporary cultural and environmental realities, is a complex psychological and imaginative internal world that demands familiarization. By welcoming the text, which is both a product of history and a feature of one’s external present, into the internal realm of the reader, the mystical hermeneutic seeks to engender the scholar to become the axis point wherein the varying realities of the text coalesce.

Mystical literature, including autobiographical reports (which are rare in Jewish mystical literature), are not simply aimed at mere documentation. They are intended to produce an *affect,* projecting experiential insights onto the reader, calling us into their worlds and demanding an engagement with the astonishing events they attest to. In other words, while these texts may report memory, they also invoke affect. Following the lead of religious studies scholar Donovan O. Schaefer, affect can here be understood “as the propulsive elements of experience, thought, sensation, feeling, and action that are not necessarily captured or capturable by language or self-sovereign ‘consciousness.’”[iii] Without an appreciation of the affective realities that mystical texts both report and aim to inspire, how can we hope to apprehend the semantic meaning embedded in their literary forms? Wolfson’s mystical hermeneutic is one model that provides such an appreciation, as seen in *Language, Eros, Being* and *Speculum’s* assessment of the poetically charged imaginal language of medieval Kabbalah. By keeping the “imaginative organ” at the forefront of his textual analysis, Wolfson maintains a proximity to the experiential element that simultaneously exceeds and creates the particular literary structure of those texts under scrutiny. He therefore seeks to transcend the binary of constructivism and perennialism, positing an intermediary position that highlights the imaginative faculty as the contextually mediating force of mystical vision. The mystical hermeneutic, I suggest, takes seriously the neuroscientific claim about the affective impact of mystical experiences.

However, while the clinical side of research tends to highlight only those persisting positive changes in attitude and behavior in the wake of mystical experience, scholars of mysticism may push beyond this, exploring the “heavens” as well as the “hells” that are embedded within the text, and mapping the phenomenological landscape of various forms of mystical consciousness. It is therefore possible to study mystical states of consciousness from the inside out, simultaneously identifying phenomenological traits in accordance with academic awareness, and illuminating how contemporary contexts mediate and structure those mystical experiences that the study facilitates.  

This paper seeks to synthesize a range of established discussions around the methodological frameworks for interpreting mystical texts, setting in conversation philosophy of mysticism, neuroscience, and affect theory. The paper postulates that a reassessment of our interpretive lineage can gesture forward towards new methodological horizons beyond the perennialist-constructivist binary. Without losing sight of debates over subjectivity/objectivity or insider/outsider, a self-reflexive mystical hermeneutic exhibited by Wolfson reanimates mystical literature within the scholar’s mind, providing pivotal comparative insights to be used by philosophers and neuroscientists of mysticism alike.

[i] Richard H. Jones, “On Constructivism in Philosophy of Mysticism,” The Journal of Religion 100, no. 1 (January 2020): 21.

[ii] Jeffrey J. Kripal, Roads of Excess, Palaces of Wisdom: Eroticism & Reflexivity in the Study of Mysticism (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicaco Press, 2007), 270.

[iii] Donovan O. Schaefer, Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 23.