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CRITIQUE OF DOGMATICCRITIQUE OF DOGMATIC
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Georges Bataille
By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, than of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word ‘mystical’.
Nor do I like narrow definitions. Inner experience responds to the necessity in which I find myself – human existence with me – of challenging everything (of putting everything into question) without permissible rest. This necessity was at work despite religious beliefs, but it has even more far-reaching consequences if one does not have these beliefs. Dogmatic presuppositions have provided experience with undue limits: he who already knows cannot go beyond a known horizon.
I wanted experience to lead where it would, not to lead it to some end point given in advance. And I say at once that it leads to no harbour (but to a place of bewilderment, of nonsense). I wanted non-knowledge to be its principle – for this reason I have followed with a keener discipline a method in which Christians excelled (they engaged themselves as far along this route as dogma would permit). But this experience born of non-knowledge remains there decidedly. It is not beyond expression – one doesn’t betray it if one speaks of it – but it steals from the mind the (3) answers it still had to the questions of knowledge. Experience reveals nothing and cannot found belief nor set out from it.
Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: ‘I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe’; he can only say ‘that which I have seen eludes understanding’ – and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe, are nothing if they are not categories of understanding.
If I said decisively: ‘I have seen God’, that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown – wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it – there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian – to which the unknown would be subjugated, for, in the form of God, the obscure unknown which ecstasy reveals is obliged to subjugate me (the fact that a theologian bursts the established framework after the fact simply means that the framework is useless; for experience, it is only a presupposition to be rejected).
In any case, God is tied to the salvation of the soul – at the same time as to the other relations on the imperfect to the perfect. Now, in experience, the feeling that I have of the unknown about which I spoke is distrustfully hostile towards the idea of perfection (servitude itself, the must be).
I read in Denys l’Aréopagite: ‘Those who by an inward cessation of all intellectual functioning enter into an intimate union with ineffable light ... only speak of God by negation’ (Noms divins, 1, 5). So is it from the moment that it is experience and not presupposition which reveals (to such an extent that, in the eyes of the latter, light is ‘a ray of darkness’; he would go so far as to say, in the tradition of Eckhart: ‘God is Nothingness). But positive theology –founded on the revelation of the scriptures – is not in accord with this negative experience. Several pages after having evoked this God whom discourse only apprehends by negating, Denys writes, ‘He possesses absolute dominion over creation… all things are linked to him as to their centre, recognizing him as their cause, their principle and their end ... (ibid, 1, 7).
On the subject of "visions", of "words" and of other "consolations", common in ecstasy, Saint John of the Cross evinces if not hostility, at least reserve. Experience has meaning for him only in the apprehension (4) of a God without form and without mode. Saint Theresa in the end only valued "intellectual vision". In the same way, I hold the apprehension of God-be he without form and without mode (the "intellectual" and not the sensuous vision of him), to be an obstacle in the movement which carries us to the more obscure apprehension of the unknown: of a presence which is no longer in any way distinct from an absence.
God differs from the unknown, in that a profound emotion, coming from the depths of childhood, is in us bound to the evocation of Him. The unknown on the contrary leaves one cold, does not elicit our love until it overturns everything within us like a violent wind. In the same way, the unsettling images and the middle terms to which poetic emotion has recourse touch us easily. If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.
Divine or poetic apprehension is on the same level as the empty apparitions of the saints, in that we can, through it, still appropriate to ourselves that which exceeds us, and, without grasping it as our own possession, at least link it to us, to that which had touched us. In this way we do not die entirely: a thread-no doubt tenuous-but a thread links the apprehended to me (had I destroyed the naive notion of him, God remains the being whose role the church has determined).
We are only totally laid bare by proceeding without trickery to the unknown. It is the measure of the unknown which lends to the experience of God – or of the poetic – their great authority. But the unknown demands in the end sovereignty without partition.
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