Mystical Bridges to an Imagined East: Meister Eckhart, Christian Mysticism, and the Human as Two

Self-described New Age author and historian of the occult, Mitch Horowitz, in a moment of incisive clarity in his 2018 book The Miracle Club, suggests the problematic reception of taken-for-granted, naturalized Asian religious concepts in European and North American new religious movements. He recounts the mutual unintelligibility that arose when trying to translate “hallmark” Dharmic religious concepts such as nonattachment into the Chinese edition of a previous book. I quote him in full to relay this insight into the genealogy of cross-cultural religious imagining, especially as it relates to Asian religions, and the way these problems of cultural and textual translation have been obscured through repetition:

Writers who can’t decipher a word of Sanskrit, Tibetan, or ancient Japanese — the languages that have conveyed these ideas from within the sacred traditions — rely upon a chain of secondary sources, often many times removed from their inception, to echo concepts like nonattachment and nonidentification. . . . In recently working with the Shanghai-based translator of a Chinese publication of my One Simple Idea, I found, to my chagrin and bemusement, that Buddhist concepts I thought that I, as a Westerner, had understood were, in my retelling, completely alien to her experience as someone raised within non-Western religious structures.^[1]

Horowitz is describing here something that postcolonial theorists have long observed in popular Euro-American depictions of Asia — that they are more representative of the desires and disaffections of the Euro-American subject than they are of the reality of the phenomenon (in this case, religion). What is often taken to be a native religious category is shown to be the latest instantiation in a long line of interpretations framed by the desires of the interpreter. Horowitz has prescient insight into the sociohistorical situatedness of all instances of cross-cultural and cross-religious comparison and appropriation, particularly those instances of comparison between “Western” and “Eastern” mysticisms. Indeed, the twenty-first-century cultural and publishing phenomenon known as “Christian mysticism” that has sought to define itself as a Western Christian analogue to an imagined Dharmic East is born out of Western Christian desires and disappointments relating to “institutional” Christianities. Contemporary Christian mysticism is, in this sense, defined by its emphasis on contemplative practice and experience over and against official, doctrinal formulations of the historic Western Christian churches as methods of accessing an immanent divine reality, often defined as “nondual” and understood to be obscured by the machinations of the ego or “separate self,” according to popular European and North American contextual understandings of Asian religious concepts.^[2] This is part of a long history: Tomoko Masuzawa charted how the very “invention” of Buddhism as a rational, psychological, demythologized alternative religion was born out of nineteenth-century desires of secular modernity and disaffections with Christianity.^[3] This invention continues in contemporary perennialist (all paths lead to the same destination) and apologetic (Christianity is a more complete path) comparisons between Christianity and Asian religions, specifically Buddhism and Vedanta: either all are one, or one (Christianity) is all.^[4] In the case of contemporary Christian mysticism, the imagining of Eastern religious others produces a new religious subjectivity through the creation of bridges to that desired alterity.

Though Horowitz occupies a different corner of contemporary occulture than that of Christian mysticism and esotericism, his insight reveals a highly pervasive discourse of othering and desiring that transcends subcultural boundaries — and yet, implicit in his statement is the fact that real people are having real experiences through the texts, practices, and organizations of a “Dharmicized” mysticism. I believe that the Orientalist origins of such hybrid Christianities should be recognized and addressed, not least because they retain the potential of perpetuating real harms, especially the caricaturing and dehumanization of East and South Asian peoples. And yet, another harm could potentially be done by attempting to critique into nonexistence the meaningful practices and traditions of others, especially those that fail to conform to hegemonic constructions of religion. To this end, Jeffrey Kripal’s concept of the “human as two” is a useful tool in analyzing the ethical quandary of contemporary Christian mysticism. The human is dual insofar as our experiences are culturally conditioned, cultural conditioning deserves criticism, and historical materialism is a generally reliable methodological framework for doing so; and yet, human spirituality (or consciousness) may be an irreducible domain of human experience even as it is expressed through sociohistorically constituted culture. In his own, more inspired words:

What we are, is a nondual system of Consciousness and [for my purposes, popular religious] Culture evolving itself in loop after loop; that Consciousness needs Culture to know itself as and in us, just as Culture needs Consciousness to exist at all; and that it is just as foolish to erase the universal (Consciousness) for the local (Culture) as it is to erase the local (Culture) for the universal (Consciousness).^[5]

As it relates to my present project on contemporary Christian mysticism, critique might further this dialectic of consciousness and culture, perhaps encouraging more just, self-reflexive religious cultures rather than simply accusing and effacing them—especially when they may well represent a more ethical alternative to the Christianity being promoted by the current far-right government of the United States.

In a previous article, I analyzed several new religious movements that have been characterized in one way or another as “esoteric Christianity” and proffered certain religious practices and texts as bridges to a perennial wisdom tradition, no less informed by Orientalist constructions of the East as fundamentally static and spiritual and the West as dynamic and material and in need of an “Oriental” intervention.^[6] Now, I turn to an important figurehead in contemporary Christian mysticism, the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, as a kind of case study to explicate this libidinal East–West “dialogue,” whose corpus and indeed whose image have become a site of an ongoing Christian reformation on the grounds of a relationship to an imagined East. Meister Eckhart’s own scholastic and pseudo-Dionysian concepts of nonattachment and nonidentification — the exact objects of obsession of Horowitz’s “Easternist”^[7] interlocutors — become the native Christian bridges to “Eastern” mysticism, reasserting the construction of the East as a mine of spiritual resources for a benighted, overly rationalistic Western Christendom, all the while creating opportunities for those who are conditioned by those same Western Christian concepts and structures for more positive avenues for spiritual expression.

An Abbreviated Reception History of Meister Eckhart

Before assessing contemporary Christian mysticism as a constructive bridge to an imagined East, it is necessary to first provide, in broad strokes, the history of Eckhart’s reception from the late Middle Ages to the present. The construction of Christian mysticism is very much bound up in the creation of the general category of mysticism, a universal domain of human experience that transcends but is primarily located within and expressed through particular religions, and Meister Eckhart is central to both the general and more provincial Christian constructions.

Eckhart has always occupied a precarious position in Western intellectual history, first posthumously falling under papal censure before being relitigated in the Reformation. Though he did not describe himself as a mystic or as a mystical theologian, Eckhart can be seen as taking part in a tradition of medieval Christian spirituality and philosophy indeed known as “mystical theology,” first put forward as a Neoplatonist conceptual model for the pilgrimage of the Christian soul toward God by pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in the sixth century. Eckhart’s sermons and treatises would remain as one corpus among many of the medieval mystical theologians until the eighteenth century and the rise of Romanticism. While recuperated by the Romantics, he was posthumously censured again as a representative of classical pagan intrusions into Christian theology levied by primarily German Protestants in the generations following the Reformation.^[8] From this period, his legacy is intimately bound up with theological, philosophical, and artistic movements in the Germanophone world until the late nineteenth century, when Meister Eckhart was taken up as a poster child for mysticism as a general category of human experience and of a Christian mystical tradition in particular.

The Romantic movement was in large part a reaction against both the increasingly disenchanted worldviews proffered by the European Enlightenment and the institutional, primarily Protestant Christianities that were in dialogue with them. Romantics argued for the primacy of human experience, especially in the realm of religion, and the transcendence of the individual over nature and culture. In the realm of theology and philosophy, Franz von Baader and G. W. F. Hegel would both draw on Meister Eckhart, in addition to other, perhaps more heterodox Germanophone religionists like Jacob Boehme, in their philosophies. Martin Heideggar’s usage of Eckhart’s term Gelassenheit represents an important twentieth-century appropriation.^[9] Thus, we see a turn from the antiapologetic criticism of Eckhart and other “mystical theologians” as a degenerating influence on apostolic Christianity with their religious enthusiasms and classical pagan textual resources, to a more positive evaluation as representing new possibilities for Christianity in the form of alternative cosmologies, new understandings of human anthropology, and especially, promotion of the newly emphasized value of individual religious experience.

As Tomoko Masuzawa and others have pointed out, this disaffection with the truth claims of institutional Christianities as defined by the doctrines of Western Christian, and especially Protestant, churches also influenced problematic legitimation discourses, informed by, for example, historical philology, by which Aryan religious traditions were seen as the more humanistic and mystical (in the contemporary sense) over and against Semitic forms that emphasized law and ritual observance. It is important to note that the rehellenizing (and later remystifying) of Christianity, by which Christianity was reconciled to the canons of post-Enlightenment European philosophy, was also bound up in its Aryanization. As England colonized South Asia, it “discovered” Buddhism in North Indian Sanskrit texts of a supposed “Aryan” provenance, through which it imagined Buddhism as a humanistic, individualistic, peaceful, and counterinstitutional tradition, framed mostly according to Western desires for and disaffections with Western Christianity. It is noteworthy that these are largely still the impressions that most White Americans have about Buddhism today and through which it is deployed as marketing material for a variety of uses, including commercial religious publics like yoga studios.

Most importantly for my purposes here, this is also the site of the construction of mysticism as a universal category of human experience, a dimension that proponents of contemporary Christian mysticism claim for Christianity as well.^[10] As such, it is an Orientalist discourse of identifying selves and others and setting up a dialectic of lack and desire between them. In Baumann and Gingrich’s anthropological work on the “grammars” of identity and alterity, they define the grammar of orientalization thus: “[The grammar of] orientalization . . . constitutes self and other by negative mirror imaging: ‘what is good in us is lacking in them,’ but it also adds a sub-ordinate reversal: ‘what is lacking in us is (still) present in them.’ It thus entails a possibility of desire for the other and even, sometimes, a potential for self-critical relativism.”^[11] In the universal category of mysticism, the desire for what the cultural other has (genuine religious experience or true religion) implies a self-critical relativism that indeed reifies Orientalist categories while also producing something new.

It is in this light that Meister Eckhart and other medieval and early modern European Christian mystics would be taken up in the Anglophone world, where “mysticism” would have great purchase as a kind of religious “brand” that could not be contained by individual traditions (though some traditions were certainly more “mystical” than others). In the United States, the transcendentalist movement arising from Unitarian churches would be a hotbed of interest in mysticism.^[12] Ralph Waldo Emerson is probably exemplary of the cultural matrix that informed this construction of mysticism, with his interest in South and East Asian literature, or what was available to him via import from the British colonies.

Moving in these circles, the philosopher and early psychologist William James schematized mysticism in his important The Varieties of Religious Experience.^[13] Drawing on mostly Christian sources, of which Eckhart is an important example, James divorces religious experience from culturally specific traditions and argues for mysticism as a universal category. Writing from a more confessional perspective, Evelyn Underhill in Britain offered another extensive typology of mysticism in her seminal work Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness,^[14] which is still read widely in both scholarly and religious communities (and especially those of contemporary Christian mysticism). In this text, Eckhart is compared to world mystics such as Rumi, both of whom are figured to speak the same mystical language despite the exoteric doctrines of their professed religions.^[15]

These and other writings continue to perform massive cultural work in attempting to renovate Christianity along mystical lines, or to find mystical bridges to an imagined East. Meister Eckhart is the prime example of mysticism in the heritage of the Latin Christian West and has been used to provide evidence for mysticism as a universal aspect of human experience (i.e., it is not just in the East, but “we” have it too) and to argue for Christianity’s equal footing within the stream of perennial religious truth. Mysticism Christian and Buddhist by the major twentieth-century popularizer of Zen Buddhism in Europe and North America, Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, is perhaps a key example. In it, he frames Eckhart as a unique purveyor of an “esoteric”^[16] variety of Christianity, who would be largely unintelligible to contemporary majoritarian Christian communities. To those for whom this renovated Christian identity is untenable, certain privileged hyphenated identities are available, such as the popular Buddhist-Christian appellation. Asian religious teachers have also contributed to the construction of this hybrid identity, of which Thich Nhat Hanh’s books, such as Living Buddha, Living Christ,^[17] and his Plum Village communities that celebrate Buddhist and Christian ceremonies, are representative. This also perhaps represents the specific “grammar of identity and alterity” Baumann and Gingrich identify as “encompassment by elites” (i.e., the absorption of a minoritized religious tradition within a liberal Protestant milieu) and the creation of “hyphenated identities” and “special categories.”^[18]

Today, this cultural work continues with participants in the now-discrete religious phenomenon of Christian mysticism. These are represented by books, conferences, and speaking tours with the goal of awakening former or current Christians to the mystical dimensions of their faith. Matthew Fox, Richard Rohr, and Cynthia Bourgeault, all massively popular authors,^[19] have seized upon the writings of Meister Eckhart, especially his sermon cycle on the Eternal Birth,^[20] to make the case for an inward Christianity that is unclaimed and unclaimable by any religious institutions. A number of parachurch organizations and communities of practice have arisen to cultivate and reproduce just this understanding of Christianity, namely, Centering Prayer, Christian Meditation, the Center for Action and Contemplation, the Order of the Sacred Earth, and many others. As Schmidt notes, even by the nineteenth century, the notion of “mysticism” became seen as almost a post-Protestant sect of Christianity put forward by liberal Protestants.^[21] From this same period forward, mysticism became defined by European colonial interaction with primarily Asian religious forms as images of its own desire and repulsion, a dynamic described by Robert Young as a dialectic of attraction and repulsion that defined European and American cultural responses to colonial contact with racial and religious others.^[22]

It is instructive to read some of the recent reception of Meister Eckhart among proponents of Christian mysticism in light of this history. A particularly illustrative example comes from Matthew Fox’s Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior for Our Times,^[23] which presents Meister Eckhart as a “native” Western tributary of a universal stream of spirituality that Christian mysticism seeks to revive in the West, known primarily by comparison to “Eastern wisdom.” He makes this epistemological claim through a familiar invocation of Carl Jung and the collective unconscious, a theoretical counterpart to Eckhart’s role as an experiential mediator with Eastern wisdom:

Jung warned Westerners: “What it has taken China thousands of years to build cannot be grasped by theft. . . . Of what use to us is the wisdom of the Upanishads or the insight of Chinese yoga, if we desert the foundations of our own culture as though they were errors outlived and, like homeless pirates, settle with thievish intent on foreign shores?” With Eckhart, we touch the depths of Western culture’s wisdom, which connects to the depths of Eastern wisdom. We can reach these depths as we begin to know the truth of the Western tradition as Eckhart lays it out for us. Today’s seekers want less religion and more experience or spirituality. Eckhart is the best of the best from the Western tradition."^[24]

Other familiar tropes discussed above and present in this brief introductory passage are the implied conflation of “religion” with institutional religious belonging, which is seen as undesirable (“seekers want less religion and more experience or spirituality”), and the implicit recognition of the violence of Orientalist desire for Asian religion in the use of the language of theft. Yet, Fox reifies the Orientalist juxtaposition of East and West: Eckhart is the best of the Western tradition because he approximates the Eastern tradition. Fox does not directly define what he means by “Eastern spirituality” or wisdom in this text, but gestures toward “archetypal mystical experiences that define Eastern spirituality.”^[25] In other words, Eastern spirituality is the image of the praxis- and experience-based spirituality that Christian mysticism seeks to construct for itself. Eastern wisdom also appears to approximate the universal mysticism constructed by an earlier generation of scholars and religionists. Others have enlisted Eckhart in this way, such as Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, claiming that Eckhart represents the “best of Western non-dualism,”^[26] or Cynthia Bourgeault’s citation of his famous quote that “the eye with which you see God is the eye with which God sees you”^[27] to describe the quality of mystical union in her book on the contemplative practice of Centering Prayer, a practice of seated meditation designed as an analogue to Buddhist and Hindu meditation practices.^[28]

Having sketched this brief history of “mysticism” and Eckhart’s role therein, I now turn to this article’s ethical response to the continuation of “mysticism” as a conceptual category with profound social implications, notably within the communities that adopt it as a positive religious identity and descriptor of their practices and communities.

Cynicism, Sincerity, and the “Human as Two” Paradigm

The subcultural translation of Meister Eckhart bears the marks of a history history of colonial desiring, a cultural palimpsest that has been a primary source in many popular religious movements and scholarly constructions. Yet, as the foregoing suggests, his current translation into a contemporary Christian mystical context presents difficult ethical questions that have largely gone unasked. The critique of Orientalism in American pop culture and popular religion is fairly well established.^[29] But how should this affect our orientation toward popular religious movements and individuals shaped in part by Orientalist discourse, especially if it may well represent a more ethical alternative to the current rise of right-wing religious populism? Indeed, writing in the aftermath of the 2024 US presidential election, I have become more concerned about the outcome of my interrogation of this history: Is it expedient to critique and deconstruct what might very well be a more life-giving alternative to ascendant White Christian nationalism? And, personal political and ethical commitments aside, is it a worthy scholarly enterprise to deconstruct another’s sincere religious practices and commitments, as if to take them away, rather than understand the unique desires and needs of the present moment that give rise to, and indeed continue to preserve, certain trajectories? Schmidt writes of the motivations behind such scholarly cynicism about “mysticism” and the lack of interest in the culture that produced it in its particular historical moment:

No doubt this modern construction of mysticism was part an Orientalist strategy of appropriation and part a vision of union solely on liberal Protestant terms, but it also served as a category to open up dialogic possibilities across cultures and traditions. The social, political, and theological conviction embedded in it was that the bridges of sympathy marked an improvement on the bombardments of colonialism and the boastings of Christian missiology. Clearly, mysticism, when imagined this way, erased difference, but it also dreamed of a common ground in a cultural domain filled with conflict and violence.^[30]

Today, a similar analysis of the desires of the present that inform Christian mystics would suggest first, that Christian mysticism is often put forward as a more nuanced, ethical — one might say “progressive” — alternative to the conservative Christianities that have been perceived to have harmed many. And indeed, these communities do see themselves this way; for example, in the Christian Meditation community, Jonathon Mermis-Cava observed that the community delights in and indeed forms its identity around religious pluralism and generous syncretism.^[31]

Today, in addition to being a veritable brand, it is also a receptacle of sincere practices, texts (sometimes of alternative canons), and organizations that fulfill a spiritual need for many people and should be considered as such by the scholarly community, not merely as a reductive instance of cynical manipulation by a self-interested cabal of Orientalist-trope-perpetuating writers, publishers, and intellectuals. Indeed, recent developments in spirituality and philology research also give me pause in denouncing the Orientalist-discourse-construed Eckhart as an illegitimate Eckhart, and by extension contemporary Christian mysticism as false mysticism: in all times and places, texts and spiritualities are “traditioned” anew when they are received in new cultural contexts.^[32] There is no essential Eckhart, only communities of reception and interpretation of Eckhart, just as there is no essential mysticism but rather communities of mystical practice and identity.

In attempting to address this ethical quandary, I invoke again Jeffrey Kripal’s schematic of the “human as two”^[33]: human religious traditions certainly have a sociohistorically conditioned, temporal aspect that is bound up in dynamics of power, privilege, and complicated, often hostile, in- and out-group dynamics that must be critiqued. On the other hand, sociohistorically conditioned religious movements, with all their baggage, also create opportunities for meaning-making and transformative reinterpretations of mythemes that are quite literally productive of religious experience and identity. A confessional religious perspective will privilege the inside of things, while conventional humanities scholarship will privilege the outside of things (with the implicit denial of any “inside” content). Kripal provides a litany of examples that “explode” this dichotomy and effectively show that these perspectives do not have to be mutually exclusive:

We have to encounter, honestly and long, the Egyptian-Greek Hermetic claim that “All is One,” the physical phenomena of the saints (of every religion), the Buddhist distinction between conventional and ultimate truth, Nisargadatta’s nondualism and its radical relativization of the social ego, the double consciousness of European Mesmerism, psychoanalysis, and critical race theory, the occult abilities of Anzaldúa’s decolonial la facultad, Cinta’s precognition and contact with the dead, and the genuine ontological revolution of mushrooms. Most of all, these ideas — and a thousand more impossible ideas — should not be shoved into our petrified religious or academic theories. They should explode how thought itself works, how we conceive of anything and everything. Taking up these very impossibilities, we have to challenge that which secular Western intellectuals assume to be the case, including our own moralities and values. We have to decolonize reality itself.^[34]

For my purposes, the kind of soft dualism that Kripal proposes here would allow for a critique of the Orientalist framing of mysticism while also acknowledging that this conceptual framework, paradoxically, produces religious experience according to its definitions. That is, despite the trouble with the outside of Christian mysticism, it conditions the inside of individuals and communities such that positive identities are formed in part on the basis of a positive evaluation of religious difference. And, in Kripal’s expansive spirit, it might even provide a road to an experience of transcendence.

In considering the circulations of contemporary Christian mysticism, considering its genealogy of Euro-Christian apologetic or appropriative self-definition against an imagined “East,” it might be best to turn back to Meister Eckhart himself to assess this formation according to his own ethical prescriptions, acknowledging that my own understanding and reception of them is conditioned historically and by my own highly particularized reading communities. This, I think, would favor the provisional use of Christian mysticism as a category so long as it instilled the “purity of heart” out of which, according to Eckhart, all right action pours forth, while recognizing the limits and dispensability of any discursive category in light of the ultimate no-thing that is God.^[35] This Neoplatonic dialectic, combined with previous, rigorous critiques of the sordid history of biased religious comparativism, would favor an “enlightened,” socially and historically aware use of the paradigm of Christian mysticism, exemplifying Jeffrey Kripal’s framework of the “human as two,” acknowledging spiritual sincerity and efficacy and problematic origins. Many contemporary Christian mystics, after all, often seek a unitive experience that transcends discourse altogether. While this might not strictly be possible, situatedness within a discourse network certainly does not abrogate religious experience, especially experience of a therapeutic nature, despite the framing discourse’s potentially impure origins.

This unitive experience (a native category of medieval spirituality) is the source of all right action in Eckhart:

This is the basis on which human nature and spirit are wholly good, and from which our human actions receive their worth; a mind completely devoted to God. . . . Indeed, with such an attitude, you might step on a stone and it would be a more pious act than to receive the body of our Lord, thinking of yourself, and it would distract your soul far less. To the man who cleaves to God, God cleaves and adds virtue. Thus, what you have sought before, now seeks you; what once you pursued, now pursues you; what once you fled, now flees you. Everything come to him who truly comes to God, bringing all divinity with it, while all that is strange and alien flies away.^[36]

The quality of this inner experience is, of course, unmeasurable by academic standards. However, the contemporary deployment of Christian mysticism and the invocation of Eckhart’s legacy, instead of toward an implicit (and impossible) pursuit of pure origins, might instead be critiqued by how it molds the ethical action of the invoking community, a prescription that is far outside the bounds of this present article but firmly within the bounds of Christian social ethics. A more robust assessment of the social lives of Christian contemplative communities is needed beyond my own text-based approach. However, the data available, as presented by Mermis-Cava’s article cited above, suggest that positive approaches (if appropriative and thus open to critique) to religious difference and pluralism form the core of the social orientation of these communities.

Conclusion

In this article, I attempted to describe the reception of Meister Eckhart in contemporary communities of Christian mysticism, contextualizing these unique and understudied communities of discourse and practice in light of the concerns that drove earlier reading communities of Meister Eckhart’s work. A consistent theme has been the enlistment of Eckhart within internal, often elite dialogues about the nature of Christianity: Is the eternity of the world (one of the main charges against Eckhart in his own day) a paganizing heresy, and to what degree does that compromise Eckhart’s mystical theology? Do pagan influences like Neoplatonism belong in Christianity, or are they a deviant force in the history of the Church? What is the role of individual religious experience in light of Christian institutional corruption and decline? Is there a realm of universal human experience that can be salvaged from the wreckage of traditional Western understandings of religion, and where is it to be sought? Contemporary Christian mystical writers’ and communities’ own reception of Meister Eckhart appears to be driven by a concern with defining an inner dimension of Christianity that is resonant with the inner traditions of other, especially Asian, religious traditions. While the existential possibilities of Christian mysticism as a discrete category of religious belonging and practice, without the Orientalist framing critiqued above, remain an open question, I conclude that the ethical issues of the Orientalist framing of mysticism and specifically Christian mysticism can be addressed without necessarily doing epistemological violence to a perhaps benign collection of religious communities. I suggest critical attention to what Jeffrey Kripal deems the “human as two”: a soft dualism that acknowledges both the reality of transcendent and perhaps supernatural realities (i.e., that trusts the reports of sincere individuals according to Kripal’s hermeneutics of trust) but that also understands that the discourses that frame such realities, even while they may have a formative influence on the quality or character of those experiences, are themselves historically conditioned.