Mystics sometimes speak as though they have a consciousness of being identical with
God. Examples are the Islamic Sufi mystic Husayn Hallaj proclaiming “I am God” (see
Schimmel 1975, ch. 2) and the Jewish Hasidic master Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady,
who wrote of a person as a drop of water in the ocean of the Infinite with an illusory
sense of individual “dropness.” The (heretical) Christian mystic Meister Eckhart made
what looked very much like identity declarations (see McGinn 2001; Smith 1997). It is an
open question, however, when such declarations are to be taken as identity assertions,
with pantheistic or acosmic intentions, and when they are perhaps variations on
descriptions of union-type experiences.
4. Ineffability and Paradoxality
4.1 Ineffability
William James affirmed that a mark of mystical experiences was their “ineffability,”
wherein “the subject of it immediately says it defies expression, that no adequate report
of its contents can be given in words” (1958, 292–93). Following James, mystical
experience is often associated with “ineffability,” that is, “indescribability.”
Unfortunately, there is some confusion about whether the experience, the object of the
experience, or both are supposed to be ineffable. Ineffability has been challenged on
logical grounds, in that one could not refer to something ineffable, and that there is a
logical contradiction in applying the concept “ineffable” to something to which none of
our concepts are supposed to apply (Plantinga 1980, 23–25; Yandell 1975). Richard Gale
(1960) and Ninian Smart (1958, 69) each argue that “ineffability” is (merely) an honorific
title marking the value and intensity of the experience for the mystic. Wayne Proudfoot
(1985) argues that mystics could not know that what they experienced could not be
expressed in any possible language, because they do not know every possible language.
He concludes that the ineffability claim only prescribes that no language system shall be
applicable to it. The word “ineffable” thus serves to create and maintain a sense of
mystery (125–27). However, because mystics could not know that a mystical object was
indescribable in any possible language, it does not follow they would not, in their
enthusiasm, make a claim beyond their knowledge. In any case, mystics might reasonably
believe that because languages known to them
end p.143
cannot describe what they experienced, in all likelihood no other human language could
describe it either.
William Alston maintains that the philosophical emphasis on ineffability is out of all
proportion to what mystics have made of it (1991, 32). There exists a strand of so-called
apophatic mysticism in which God is said to be unknown. However, even apophatic
mystics have had much to say about their experiences and about God. Alston offers that
“indescribability” refers to the difficulty of describing in literal terms, rather than by