Joshua Lupo (JL): Professor Prevot, thanks for talking with Contending Modernities about your recent book The Mysticism of Ordinary Life: Theology, Philosophy, and Feminism (2023), a work that engages with a wide range of thinkers who often approach the topic of mysticism and ordinary life from very different starting points. Despite their differing starting points, you show that they are all working on projects with significant overlaps that have bearing on important issues in Christian theology. The book, in short, seeks to bring the resources of feminist theory to bear on Catholic theological conversations around the everyday experiences of the divine. In doing so, it shows how such experiences often lead those on the socio-political margins to push for change. To begin with, what motivated you to take up this project, and what was your process for selecting the thinkers on whom you write?
Andrew Prevot (AP): I first conceived this book as a sequel to Thinking Prayer: Theology and Spirituality amid the Crisis of Modernity. The diverse roster of interlocutors in The Mysticism of Ordinary Life reflects choices already made in this earlier work. Both books develop a central theme in Christian spirituality (whether prayer or mysticism) by examining its influence on contemporary Catholic theology, postmodern philosophy, and diverse social-praxis contexts: European, Latine, and Black. On a more personal note, these are all pieces of myself. I am an American Catholic theologian with a background in continental philosophy, a mixed African and French ancestry, and a strong sense of obligation to resist oppression in whatever form it takes. Spirituality, which for me means a life in intimate relationship with God, motivates my work at all of these levels.
In Thinking Prayer, I focused on sources that could help me articulate a doxological alternative to metaphysics, that is, a way of approaching God through praise and worship instead of abstract systems of knowledge and being. I also discussed sources that expressed a spiritual basis for the struggle against economic and racial violence. I turned in The Mysticism of Ordinary Life toward a different, yet connected, set of questions surrounding the potential for a transformative mystical response to the metaphysics and politics of gender. I had been reading feminist theorists such as Grace Jantzen, Amy Hollywood, Catherine Keller, Sarah Coakley, and others, who were drawing on Christian mystical writings to make fascinating philosophical and theological arguments in this area, and I agreed with much that I found in their works. However, there was more that I wanted to say, especially by bringing a certain Catholic clarity (if that’s a fair word for it) to the philosophy-theology relationship and by taking a more intersectional approach to the feminist interpretation of mysticism.
I also wanted to emphasize that my concerns were not just about thought but life—ordinary life. The deeper I got into the research, the more I realized that this word “ordinary” was at least as difficult as the word “mystical,” because of the paradoxical manner in which it simultaneously channels the crushing powers of normativity and contests them through appeals to our never-fully-governable, living flesh (i.e., the “quotidian”).
Although I find Catholic theologians such as Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar useful in their efforts to retrieve an everyday Christian mysticism amid the hazards of western modernity, they remain vulnerable to rigorous feminist critique. The mystical theology they represent, therefore, needs further development. The postmodern reception of Christian mysticism, parsed as a symbol of Michel Henry’s notion of auto-affective immanence (the feeling of oneself that grounds subjectivity and humans’ connection to divinity) and Michel de Certeau’s disruptive alterity (that is, the “otherness” that disrupts our normative orders) has, whatever its theological limitations, been generative of new spiritually and socially meaningful approaches. The so-called “French feminists” Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva show the power of this sort of postmodern mystical thinking, both to subvert the androcentrism of psychoanalysis and western philosophy more broadly, and to develop women’s (and men’s) subjectivity. I wanted to take stock of all this theological and philosophical literature, while sorting out its different disciplinary warrants. I also wanted to bring it into dialogue with mystical works by women living in the wake of conquest and slavery, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Alice Walker, and M. Shawn Copeland, among others. I wanted to show that a theologically responsible, postmodernly revitalized feminist mystical theology could go beyond typical Eurocentrism. The quotidian lives of Black and Brown women are sites of divine presence to which theology and philosophy need to attend.
JL: To pick up a central feature of the argument you mentioned in your first response, I want to ask you to unpack two central concepts in the book—mysticism and the ordinary—for us. What do these terms mean in the context of your theological argument? And how do they relate to the pursuit of justice? They have at times been treated in academic and broader public discourse as reflective more of individual concerns rather than collective ones. Still, you have something different in mind, I think.
AP: There is a common feminist slogan, “the personal is political.” I endorse this statement and add my own spin by asserting that “the mystical is political.” Domestic spaces where patriarchy reigns unchecked, everyday struggles to put food on the table, the hard work of developing a voice as a member of a subaltern group, the quiet pain of living as a hated racial or sexual minority, the challenge of coping with intergenerational traumas—all of these are not merely examples of personal experience. They are socially constructed situations in which a potentially revolutionary encounter with the unknown God of incarnate love might occur. This is my argument in a nutshell.
To be more precise, it may help, as you suggest, to clarify my central concepts of mysticism and the ordinary. In the introduction to the book, I distinguish two broad ways of understanding mysticism. One of these is more philosophical or psychological (which does not mean it is off-limits to theology, but only that theology does not define it). This account associates mysticism with certain modifications of human consciousness, language, or embodiment, which push these features of our finite existence beyond the ways in which they typically appear or function. We might think of a mind in a state of ecstasy, in which the faculties of memory, intellect, and will are suspended. We might think of uses of language that feature bold negations, provocative metaphors, or incomprehensible paradoxes. We might think of out-of-body experiences or unexplainable visions or sensations. This model of mysticism brackets the question of its cause. Perhaps such alterations are a result of naturally occurring or meditatively or psychedelically induced shifts in brain chemistry. They may indicate some supernatural forces at play, whether demonic, angelic, or divine. Knowing the answer to this causal question is not necessary. The moral status of such mysticism is, therefore, ambiguous, as is its value for theology. It relies merely on some perceived difference between the ordinary and the extraordinary in human experience.
By contrast, a properly theological understanding of mysticism makes a claim about God. It holds that mysticism occurs when God enters into an intimate, perhaps even boundary-blurring relationship with human beings, transforming them into—or perhaps simply revealing them to be—vessels of divine love, goodness, or virtue. On this account, mysticism is a particular type of grace. It is not merely a gift of divine assistance; it is a deep partnership or intermingling between the divine and the human, which God initiates. A true recipient of such mystical grace aspires to live as God would have them live, and so the moral ambiguity largely drops away. Efforts to demonstrate the presence of such grace by appealing to unusual psychosomatic phenomena are misguided, because these prove nothing essential. By the same token, a person living a seemingly conventional life may be a true mystic walking among us: someone profoundly united with God. Compared with the preceding philosophical or psychological approach, this theological one can more easily recognize a mysticism of ordinary life without fear of contradiction, because, for it, mysticism is not defined as a departure from supposedly ordinary phenomenological norms but simply as God’s gracious union with us.
However, if mysticism means being one with God, as this account holds, then it follows that mysticism will resist social conventions that violate God’s benevolent intentions for humanity and creation. Therefore, the theological approach also allows for a mystical subversion of norms, but only to the extent that such norms contradict the loving and healing aims of divine grace. In a cultural environment where certain kinds of bodies are valued more than others because of race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other differences, and where such hierarchies are violently enforced, the word “ordinary” can hardly be innocent. It carries the awful weight of this malicious sorting of people into categories of lovable and unlovable, grievable and ungrievable, welcome and unwelcome, free and unfree. The antagonistic energy found in both philosophical and theological forms of mysticism can be harnessed to oppose such unholy normativity.
In a cultural environment where certain kinds of bodies are valued more than others…and where such hierarchies are violently enforced, the word “ordinary” can hardly be innocent.
Yet, in this revolt, mysticism retains a positive relationship with ordinary life for at least two reasons. First, mysticism inevitably finds expression in what I call the “quotidian”: that is, the experiential, temporal, contextual, singular, plural, opaque everydayness of life, which is never fully governed by norms. There is nowhere else for it to appear, even if its phenomenological features are extraordinary. The normal and the quotidian are two poles of the equivocal concept of the ordinary. Second, mysticism, especially but not exclusively in the theological sense, encourages the development of diverse communities that are not merely sites of chaos but places of shareable, incarnate love. Theological mysticism is not anti-normative per se. It is only hostile to those norms that unjustly stigmatize, imperil, or otherwise harm the precious, mysterious creatures God has made, but this is enough to make it a powerful, justice-seeking force in the world.
JL: This framing of the mystical ordinary clearly poses a significant challenge to secularism and modernity as ideological projects. The norms embodied in those projects are no doubt responsible for the oppression that continues to run rampant in our world. The final two chapters in the book draw on mestizo/a and Womanist philosophies and theologies to build a liberatory alternative. Could you provide us with an example or two of how these thinkers challenge these forms of domination?
AP: While it is true that my book contests secularism, I also want to acknowledge that some varieties of the mysticism of ordinary life are compatible with, and even sustained by, secular (or secularizing) philosophy. We might consider, for example, certain streams in nineteenth-century romanticism and idealism that attempt to unite the absolute with the contingent in a manner that draws on German mystical thought while verging on atheism. As Part 1 of the book indicates, this is the intellectual milieu that influential twentieth-century theologians, such as Rahner and Balthasar, both presuppose and challenge in their efforts to recover a more orthodox mystical theology that would, nevertheless, take advantage of certain modern philosophical emendations.
Theological mysticism is not anti-normative per se. It is only hostile to those norms that unjustly stigmatize, imperil, or otherwise harm the precious, mysterious creatures God has made.
Part 2 shows how the postmodern, primarily Francophone, late-twentieth-century turn away from the totalizing ambitions of modern metaphysics goes hand-in-hand with an alternative way of secularizing the mysticism of ordinary life. The postmodern thinkers I discuss meditate on the phenomena of touch, affect, flesh, immanence, on the one hand, and otherness, strangeness, and difference, on the other, and treat these phenomena as analogous to, and perhaps even as substitutes for, God’s presence and transcendence. Although a new God of the philosophers is conceivable within this postmodern mystical discourse, as Henry and Irigaray perhaps show most clearly, it is also possible to take leave of God and advance an atheistic mysticism, in line with Georges Bataille. In these first two parts of the book, I attempt to sort out what a more traditional, grace-based mystical theology could look like amid the secularizing intellectual shifts not just of modernity but also of postmodernity.
In Part 3, which was more the focus of your question, I consider the configurations of the mysticism of ordinary life on the colonized and racialized undersides of modernity and postmodernity. All of the thinkers I study in this section refuse the secular insofar as it is an ideological project of cultural erasure. However, certain figures, such as the Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa and the founder of womanism, Alice Walker, approach mysticism in a manner that may be regarded as philosophical, psychological, or naturalist. For the most part, their sense of the divine as immanent in quotidian life is not derived from Christian scripture or tradition (though they do occasionally comment on such sources) but from Indigenous and personal experience. Anzaldúa and Walker are not atheists, but they do write in a manner that some might consider “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR)—or, if still religious, then neither Christian nor institutional. Anzaldúa and Walker find the strength to resist oppression through their intimate connections with a pervasive, life-giving Spirit, to whom Anzaldúa prays, “Oh, Spirit—wind sun sea earth sky—inside us, all around us, enlivening all / We honor tu presencia” (159; quoted in Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 196). Walker’s character Shug expresses a similar perspective: “My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed” (195; quoted in Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 241).
By contrast, the Catholic theologians Ada María Isasi-Díaz and M. Shawn Copeland take a more obviously confessional approach to the interpretation of Latina and Black women’s experiences of mystical grace, including in some cases their own. While walking a picket line, Isasi-Díaz had a sudden feeling of God’s indwelling love: “I could feel, sense God, and I could wrap my arms around the divine” (24, quoted in Prevot, The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 203). Copeland reflects on the personal closeness that enslaved persons found with the crucified Jesus: “Bloodied and nailed to rough wooden plans, he was the One who went all the way with them and for them” (26; quoted in The Mysticism of Ordinary Life, 255). These are just a few examples. I want to be clear that, just because Isasi-Díaz and Copeland write as doctrinally committed theologians and thereby maintain a greater distance from the post-Christian secularity of modern and postmodern thought than Anzaldúa and Walker do, this does not make them more resistant to enslaving, conquering, and rapacious violence than Anzaldúa and Walker are. The diverse philosophical and theological versions of the mysticism of ordinary life that all of these thinkers elaborate are comparable in their level of defiance against the body- and soul-destroying evil of the present age.
JL: Your response to the previous question helpfully clarifies your methodology and relationships to the various currents in modern and postmodern theology and philosophy. As a final question, I wanted to ask you to consider the place of the book and its argument alongside another emerging trend in recent scholarship on religion.
Over the past few years, scholars in religious studies have returned to the language of the sacred as a challenge to something like what you call above “unholy normativity.” We see this in the work of religious studies scholars Barbara Sostaita, who finds the sacred, for example, in the crosses marking the sites where migrants died near the border between the US and Mexico, and in the work of Joseph Winters, who finds the sacred in hip hop artists who channel an unruly normativity to challenge White supremacy. Reading your book, I saw a kind of convergence in theological work and work in religious studies around a desire to find alternatives outside the constraints of a hegemonic rationalist discourse in the academy. Do you see your work as a part of (or in solidarity with) the “turn to the sacred”? Or does its desire to form a more orthodox theological response to the moment place it in a different lineage?
AP: I definitely see my work in solidarity with the projects of Barbara Sostaita, Joseph Winters, and others who reclaim “the sacred” as an honorific title for migrant, Black, Indigenous, and diversely gendered lives insofar as they disrupt, exceed, flee, or fight structures of domination, from which they, nevertheless, continue to suffer. (And thanks for drawing attention to these important books!) This use of “the sacred” is very closely aligned—to the point of being virtually synonymous—with postmodern accounts of “the mystical” as an anti-normative, quotidian flesh and otherness, especially as such accounts have been received and modified by the thinkers in Latine and Black studies and intersectional feminism whom I discuss in the last part of my book. Whether we call it “mystical” or “sacred,” this lived, critical distance from systems of control and punishment is an undeniable focal point of the sort of literature, theory, psychology, and politics that I regard as actually speaking truth in this era of rampant misinformation and ideology.
I grant that, by and large, the authors who share this sensibility are not writing as theologians. Often, they choose words like “sacred” and “mystical” carefully, precisely in order to avoid making doctrinal statements about God, even while holding fast to certain values or experiences that have religious resonances: e.g., sanctuary or ecstasy. Nevertheless, I maintain that such scholars are invaluable interlocutors for theology. Those of us in theology who are trying to work out the meaning of Christian faith in the midst of this violent world—in spite of the shameful Christian complicity in it, of which we are painfully aware; indeed, in hopes of reducing the level of this complicity and actually following the way of Jesus—need these nontheological seers of the sacred in much the same way that Augustine needed Plotinus, Aquinas needed Aristotle, or Rahner needed Schelling. They provide the “natural philosophy” in relation to which we can hope to formulate a new theology of mystical grace. To speak about how God may touch the lives of people in this world, theologians need to understand the material and structural conditions under which such lives survive, dance, hope, and pray.
Those of us in theology who are trying to work out the meaning of Christian faith in the midst of this violent world…need these nontheological seers of the sacred in much the same way that Augustine needed Plotinus, Aquinas needed Aristotle, or Rahner needed Schelling.
One goal of my explicitly theological work is to maintain a space within academic literature where the God-talk of racially oppressed women and men can be represented without being transposed into a register where questions of God are bracketed as a matter of course. Crying out to God, singing hymns to God, and placing all one’s hopes in God are prevalent practices in Latine and Black communities. I acknowledge that they are not universal: secularism exists in such spaces too. However, many of the embattled persons whom scholars across disciplines endeavor to support would associate the sacred and the mystical precisely with experiences of God working graciously in their lives, moving in their bodies and souls, and, at least in some cases, answering their prayers. They would think of such terms, if they recognized themselves in them at all, not merely as symbols of a lived antagonism toward normativity, but as names pointing to a personal relationship with an agential, powerful, loving, and mysterious deity. Theology enables me to express solidarity with these persons in their faith and to explore its complex connections with their culture and politics. To some extent, this is what religious studies and other nontheological fields are doing too by speaking of “the sacred,” but theology is, by design, more open to interpretations of this term that reveal levels of meaning beyond the natural and the anthropological.
Of course, these disciplinary differences are ultimately matters of personal preference. And, in any case, solidarity does not imply uniformity. In my books and my ongoing teaching and research, I embrace contributions across various academic and nonacademic, theological and nontheological sectors of the struggle, and I see my work as making just one small addition to what is a diverse, collective effort. I stand with anyone who strives to affirm quotidian lives and to resist oppression. To me, this is a sacred practice regardless of whether it is done for religious or nonreligious reasons.
