Actualizado: 2026-11-06
What are the typical traits of mystic language: silence contradictory… What else.?
Beyond silence and paradox/contradiction, the usual traits:
The common tension: using language to point beyond language. That’s why so many mystical texts end the way the Tractatus does, in silence.
If you want to cite: James, The Varieties of Religious Experience; Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying; de Certeau, The Mystic Fable.
What about d’ells. Book?
You mean Michael Sells’ Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press, 1994). It’s probably the best study of how mystical language works, as opposed to what it believes.
Core argument - Apophasis is a mode of discourse, not a doctrine. “Negative theology” suggests a set of statements about God (“God is not X”). Sells reads it as apo-phasis, “un-saying”: a way of speaking that keeps cancelling itself. - The aporia of transcendence. To say the transcendent is “ineffable” is already to name it, which contradicts the claim. So you have to unsay that, then unsay the unsaying. That open regress is the meaning, not a defect. - The “meaning event.” At certain moments the language doesn’t describe a union (soul–God) but enacts it: grammar breaks down, subject and object fuse, pronouns slide, and the sentence performs the identity it talks about. Eckhart’s “the eye with which I see God…” is a classic case. - Double propositions. Contrary statements held together; neither alone carries the meaning, only the tension between them.
The five authors he reads 1. Plotinus — the One “beyond being”; the language of emanation and return. 2. John Scotus Eriugena — God as nihil (nothing by excess); creation as divine self-manifestation. 3. Ibn Arabi — “the heart capable of every form”; God revealing himself through the beliefs held about him. 4. Marguerite Porete — The Mirror of Simple Souls, the annihilated soul, the dialogue between Love and Reason, the paradox of “FarNear” (Loingprès). 5. Meister Eckhart — the Godhead beyond God, the birth of the Word in the soul, the ground (grunt).
Why it matters He sets these medieval writers alongside Derrida and the deconstruction debate on negative theology, showing that self-subverting language has a long history before poststructuralism. And he separates apophasis from a vague appeal to “ineffability”: what interests him is the precise textual mechanics, not an experience behind the text.
For your Tractatus side: Sells is essentially describing a ladder you climb and kick away, except that the climbing never ends.
What is the content of the book?
The book has an introduction and seven chapters (my earlier “five, one per author” was off: Ibn Arabi gets two, and there’s a closing comparative chapter):
Introduction/Unsaying — 1. Awakening without Awakener: Apophasis in Plotinus — 2. The Nothingness of God in John the Scot Eriugena — 3. Ibn Arabi’s Polished Mirror: Identity Shift and Meaning Event — 4. Ibn Arabi’s Garden among the Flames: The Heart Receptive of Every Form — 5. Apophasis of Desire and the Burning of Marguerite Porete — 6. Meister Eckhart: Birth and Self-Birth — 7. Porete and Eckhart: The Apophasis of Gender.
What each part covers (my summary):
Along the way he also brings in Jewish apophatic writers such as Abraham Abulafia and Moses de León. His overall thesis: the more radical claims of apophatic writers — often dismissed as hyperbolic or condemned as pantheistic or nihilistic — are vital to an adequate account of the mystical languages of unsaying.
About 256 pages, University of Chicago Press, 1994; honourable mention for the AAR Best First Book in the History of Religions.
Sources: - SDSU Humanities Hub catalogue entry - University of Chicago Press reference page - AbeBooks listing