The highest mountains come from the sea.’ A post-secular ‘bridge’ between beings: the experience of suffering in the mystical optics of via negativa

Abstract

Taking up the problem of suffering in philosophical, theological, or religious studies terms opens an ocean of exegetical possibilities. Interpretations of suffering known in Western and Eastern philosophies and religions emerge from different epistemic orders: levels of experience, consciousness, and ontological registers. In this text, I am interested in a postsecular perspective on two dimensions of the via negativa: suffering bound up with the human mystical experience, in which a divine transformation of one’s seeing/self/being takes place, and the suffering of animals – their silent cry. Drawing on the experience of Christian mysticism (specifically: Rhenish and Carmelite) and Buddhist mysticism (specifically: the Mahayana transmission lineage associated with the bodhisattva ideal), I ask whether the pain of purification and growth, and the pain of taking upon oneself in a gesture of transforming love and compassion (kenosis and the bodhisattva), characteristic of a transcendent direction of human spiritual development and tied to human freedom, has anything to offer the silent scandal of animal suffering, which seems to be governed by a chain of determinism. In the deconstructive spirit of apophatic mysticism, I propose building a bridge between beings.