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The Prophetic and the Mystical: Heiler Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Rowan Williams
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Friedrich Heiler’s Classic essay on prayer — Das Gebet — first appeared in 1919: several times reprinted and revised, with an abbreviated translation into English published in 1931, this vastly influential work helped to popularize and to fix in the theological mind a sharp distinction between two antithetical styles of spirituality, the ‘mystical’ and the ‘prophetic’. The distinction owed something to William James, something to a group of Lutheran scholars interested in the history and phenomenology of religion, of whom the most significant is probably the great Nathan Söderblom (whose general influence upon Heiler is very considerable). Heiler enumerates a variety of ways in which what he and his teachers thought of as a basic polarity in religion might be characterized — as a tension between the healthy and the diseased, the active and the passive, or (with Söderblom) between a mysticism of the affirmation of personality and a mysticism of the denial of personality. For Söderblom, this ran parallel to the distinction between ‘salvation-religions’, with the notion of escape or release at their centre, and religions of revelation and prophecy. For Seeberg, working in the same tradition, it was the gulf between the ‘contemplative’ and the ‘voluntarist’ approaches. Heiler, understandably, sees no point in speaking of two kinds of mysticism here, and so frames his own version of the confrontation in terms simply of the mystical in general (understood as involving ‘radical denial of the world and the ego’) and the ‘prophetic’; and he proceeds to develop a detailed and intriguing typology of spiritualities, which has remained probably the most influential section of his work.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 64 , Issue 757-758 , July 1983 , pp. 330 - 347
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Das Gebet. Eine Religionsgeschtliche und Religionspsychologische Untersuchung. 5th edition, Munich, 1923, pp 248‐50Google Scholar. All subsequent references will be to this edition.

2 Ibid. p 249.

3 Pp 255‐6.

4 Pp 262‐5, 272‐9.

5 P 279.

6 P 282.

7 P 318.

8 P 396.

9 Pp 404‐7.

10 P 408 (cf. p 245).

11 P 269.

12 P 491.

13 P 359‐60.

14 P 400.

15 P 250

16 Church of England Newpaper, 2 September 1932.

17 See Heiler, pp 369‐72.

18 Ibid. p 245.

19 P 263.

20 P 283.

21 E g: pp 350‐1.

22 This perception has been developed by several feminist writers – recently and very powerfully by Griffin, Susan, Pomography and Silence, London, Women's Press, 1981Google Scholar.

23 P 272.

24 See Robinson, Edward (ed.), The Original Vision (Oxford, Religious Experience Research Unit, 1977)Google Scholar; This Time‐Bound Ladder. Ten Dialogues on Religious Experience (Oxford, RERU 1977)Google Scholar; Living the Questions (Oxford, RERU, 1978Google Scholar).

25 E g Hartmann, Sven S. and Edsman, Carl‐Martin (eds.), Mysticism (Stockholm, 1970)Google Scholar, Katz, Stephen (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (OUP, 1978)Google Scholar, Woods, Richard (ed.), Understanding Mysticism (London, Athlone Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

26 Good examples of such analysis can be found in Hjalmar Sundén's paper (‘Meditation and Perception. Some Notes on the Psychology of Religious Mysticism’) in Hartmann and Edsman, op. cit. and Robert T. Gimello, ‘Mysticism and Meditation’, in Katz, op.cit.

27 See e.g. Louis Bouyer's seminal study, ‘Mysticism An Essay on the History of the Word’, reproduced in Woods, op. cit, for details of late antique and early Christian usage.

28 For an important example, see Guenther, H., Buddhist Philosophy in Theory and Practice, Penguin Books, 1972, p 87Google Scholar, and n. 11, p 219.

29 Thus, when we speak of ‘prophet churches’ in contemporary Africa, for instance, however sharply defined the term is in its context, it is fairly clear that ‘prophet’ does not mean precisely what it means as applied to Amos or Isaiah, or even as applied to the ‘prophets’ of the New Testament or the early Church. See Bengt Sundkler's classic study, Bantu Prophets in South Africa (2nd edition, OUP, 1961), pp 109‐117Google Scholar, and Appendix A pp 350‐3, for characterizations of ‘prophetic’ leader‐ship in this tradition. Points worth noting are the importance of certain shamanictype features (derived from Zulu sources) in call and initiation, and the interpretation of an initial ‘prophetic’ experience as a call to found or assemble a new community.

30 I have in mind here, for example, certain of the weighty criticisms levelled against Eliade for unduly homogenizing diverse patterns of ritual and myth. See the excel‐lent monograph by Saliba, John A., ‘Homo Religiosus’ in Mircea Eliade (Leiden, Brill, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and the still more critical study by Streki, Ivan, ‘Mircea Eliade: Some Theoretical Problems’, in Cunningham, A (ed), The Theory of Myth. Six Studies (London, Sliced & Ward, 1973)Google Scholar.

31 Quoting Pedersen in ‘The origins of prophecy in Israel’, Israel's Prophetic Tradition. Essays in Honour of Peter Ackroyd, ed Coggins, R., Phillips, A. and Knibb, Michael, CUP, 1982, p 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and cf. p 25.

32 For a survey of recent views on the relation of the prophets to cultic institutions, see Robert Murray, ‘Prophecy and the cult’, in Coggins, Phillips and Knibb, op. cit.

33 His classical essay is ‘The Rise and Function of the Holy Mass in Late Antiquity’, Journal of Roman Studies, 1971, pp 80‐101. The theme is developed in The Making of Late Antiquity, Harvard University Press, 1978Google Scholar, and several studies in this area (including the JRS article) are collected in Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity, Faber, 1982Google Scholar.

34 Thus apocalyptic develops in such contexts (as in intertestamental Judaism), as a promise of the restoration of true vision and free access to the holy at the end of history. Insofar as it sees this as partly realizable in the present, apocalyptic provides a seedbed for ecstatic/‘mystical’ techniques and conventions of visionary imagery. See the magisterial survey by Rowland, C. C., The Open Heaven. A Study of Apocalyptic in Judaism and Early Christianity, London, SPCK, 1982Google Scholar.

35 Halifax, Joan, Shamanic Voices. A Survey of Visionary Narratives, Penguin Books, 1980, pp 21‐2Google Scholar. This volume contains a rich assortment of source material, with vivid and sympathetic commentaries tending perhaps to over‐systematize the reports presented.

36 See Eliade, Mircea, Shamanism. Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, London, RKP, 1964, pp 34, 36‐Google Scholar8; see also Humphrey, Caroline, ‘Shamans and the Trance: an ethnographic study from Buryat shamanism’, I, Theoria to Theory, vol V, no 4, and II, vol VI, no I esp II, pp 52, 54Google Scholar.

37 Eliade, op. cit. pp 436‐7; cf. David‐Néel, Alexandra, Magic and Mystery in Tibet, London, Souvenir Press, 1967Google Scholar, for accounts of the chöd ritual.

38 Note the marked difference in convention here between sub‐Arctic and Central Asian shamanism on the one hand and the very widespread dependence on hallucinogens in Central and Southern American practice. This is amply illustrated in Halifax, op. cit.

39 On the koan in this connection and its relation to other reconstitutive mental/contemplative disciplines, including Christian contemplation, see Margaret Masterman ‘Theism as a Scientific Hypothesis II The Relevance of Apophatic Theology’, Theoria to Theory, vol I, no 2.

40 Humphrey, art. cit. II, 49‐51.

41 See especially The Four Gated City, London, MacGibbon and Key, 1969Google Scholar Briefing for a Descent into Hell, London, Jonathan Cape, 1971Google Scholar, Shikasta, London, Jonathan Cape, 1979Google Scholar.

42 E.g. in The Sacred and the Profane. The Nature of Religion, New York, 1959, pp 209ffGoogle Scholar. Compare some of his remarks on Freud in No Souvenirs. Journal, 1957‐1969, London, RKP, 1978, esp p 95Google Scholar.

43 Cf the discussion of Janov's ‘primal therapy’. ‘The Primal Scream’, Theoria to Theory, vol VI, no 4, esp pp 28‐32.Google Scholar

44 Humphrey, art. cit. I, p 42.

45 Ibid. II, pp 49‐50.

46 ‘Shamanism as an Experiencing of the“Unreal”, Carl‐Edsman, Martin (ed), Studies in Shamanism, Stockholm, 1967, pp 181‐2Google Scholar.

47 Ibid. p 184.

48 Quoted in Halifax, op. cit. p 15.

49 Art. cit. p 178.

50 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 1962, esp chapter 10Google Scholar.

51 See chap 2 of Saward, John, Perfect Fools. Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality, OUP, 1980, pp 21‐4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 Pp 220‐47 of Heiler are devoted to prayer in the experience of the ‘religious genius’ (Jesus, Luther, Tersteegen…).

53 I have tried to develop some of these themes a little further in Eucharistic Sacrifice. The Roots of a Metaphor, Grove Liturgical Study, No 31, Nottingham, 1982, esp pp 13‐20, 27‐32Google Scholar.

54 Op. cit. p 18.