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564 - Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions |
Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions
and Unions
By Dan Merkur
Albany, State University of New York Press, 1993. 387 pp. $59.50, $19.95 (pb).
This is not a book about Gnosticism but about the kinds of knowledge (gnosis) that derive from mystical unions and ecstatic visions. It is not comprehensive but treats only Western Gnosticism, Jewish Merkabah mysticism, Islamic mysticism, medieval Christian mysticism, Renaissance spiritualistic alchemy, and the tenuous bridges between them. (Did I say "only"? !) What makes it so fascinating is Merkur's taxonomy of mystical experiences and his deft way of distinguishing often misunderstood types of mystical experience by means of his classificatory system.
Merkur comes to this task with an astonishingly comprehensive knowledge of his subject. The result is a remarkable blending of modern psychological and anthropological disciplines with an insider's grasp of the basic phenomena. If there is a more enlightening treatment of visions, trance states, and mystical unions, I don't know about it.
What people like Jung, Eliade, Henry Corbin, and Merkur are teaching us is that the most intimate personal experiences of the divine can be studied without reducing them to neurotic or psychotic states. Perhaps, their greatest gift is the restoration of the imagination to a position of honor and prominence, with the recognition that what is imagined has reality in its own realm and real-world consequences that flow from it.
What Merkur does is distinguish the variety of ways God speaks through our imaginations, minds, and bodies. Along the way, there is brilliant analysis of ancient texts that have never been so well understood. Merkur is particularly acute in showing that Jung and others were wrong to think that alchemy had a
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565 - Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical Visions and Unions |
direct line of descent from ancient Gnosticism. The spiritualization of alchemy was largely the work of Paracelsus in the Renaissance.
With this volume, the psychological study of mysticism has come of age. Someone ought to endow a Chair of Practical Mysticism somewhere and install Merkur in it.
Walter Wink
Auburn Theological Seminary
New York, NY.