/lit/ - Literature

>: if mediation in mysticism is preserved as mediation, one is necessarily barred from the full, mystical union with the divine “without distinction”; but if mediation is negated in mysticism, then one forecloses the possibility of comprehending the mystical union as such, there being neither thought nor that which is thought. In short, it appears that mysticism presents us with a theory of mediation that is inherently self-negating, a theory of mediation in which the fulfillment of mediation is in fact the negation of all mediation.

>In this final type of mediation, mediation is so perfect that it negates mediation itself, with not even a residue of difference left behind, “a modeless abyss of fathomless beatitude.” With neither a subject-object distinction, nor a mediated context within which they can be made indistinct, the human-philosophical capacities of the empirical, the volitional, and the conceptual are all incapacitated. “There they fall away from themselves and become lost in a state of unknowing which has no ground.” [22] This is the final stage of apophaticism, “the dark stillness which always stands empty,” where the mystical subject is a non-subject, “drunk with love and asleep in God in a dark resplendence