The Superhumanities

I have been sitting with these stories of flaming monks for over 20 years, ever since I first stumbled across them when I was a graduate student here at Harvard Divinity School. The safe way to interpret them is as colorful illustrations of these naïve ancients’ earnest theological commitments and convictions: they are culturally intelligible metaphors, but of an essentially false view of the world. There is, after all, no divine fire that pervades this world, no such flame we can perceive and channel. And yet, from the very beginning, I had an inkling that this approach was wrong, a kind of metaphysical itch I could not scratch by these licit interpretations. I have felt at times as if my scholarly peers would respond to my inklings and itches with the same worried condescension European colonists voiced of some of their own: that I have “gone native.” That slur operated then, as now, to maintain a sharp difference between “us” and “them,” colonizer and colonized, and so to preserve colonial power and rule. The “natives” in my case are ancient witnesses from whom, so this logic goes, we must maintain an appropriate scholarly distance, to preserve interpretive power and rule.

Remove just a single letter from this slur, and you get another: that I have “gone naïve”;¹³ that I pine for a re-enchanted world and am trying to drink from a metaphysical well we now know, in our postmetaphysical certainty, to be dry, not because it has dried up, but because from the beginning it never had any water. It is true that I spend my days trying to take very seriously ancient metaphysics that most scholars today regard as hopelessly naïve, none more so than the broad tradition we have come in the West to call “Platonism.” In May 2024 the Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) is hosting a conference, “Platonism as a Living Tradition,” whose premise is that nearly all scholars working on Platonism are themselves Platonists in one sense or another, and regard themselves as part of a living tradition, links in what some ancient Platonists called the “Golden Chain.” But scholars are discouraged from speaking of their existential commitments to this living tradition, because they wish to survive in the embattled humanities, and to fit in, be it—in the Platonists’ case—in departments of philosophy, classics, history, or religious studies. And, so, their commitments and convictions are spoken of in hushed voices. We are not quite at the point where all talk of three dimensions (or more) has been exactly outlawed, or the dreaming squares imprisoned. But as Foucault has taught us, there are subtler ways to discipline and punish, less visible means to surveil, police, and imprison—the most insidious are those in which we often collude.

Just beneath our existential commitments we often find experiences, especially extraordinary ones: those that are hard to put into words, that confound our allegedly consensual reality, that challenge, sustain, and inspire us. Kripal has spent a career trying to get scholars of religion (and humanists more generally) to take such experiences, and those who have them, seriously: “[The Superhumanities] is also an extended essay about why a strong and unapologetically comparative study of extreme and often culturally anomalous human experiences—historically coded as religious but increasingly separated today from these historical associations—must be central to the transformation of the humanities” (7). To take experiences and those who have them seriously is not to take them literally. To take them literally is, I believe, “naïve.” To take Couliano’s fork literally would mean to accept its appearance as disparate phenomena. I don’t know what exactly to make of the reports of flaming monks from the first several centuries of early Christianity. I have tried to put them into dialogue with other evidence: mythology, scripture, philosophy (physics and metaphysics), theology, hagiography—anything I can find from the ancient Mediterranean world. The evidence is vast.

When I try to assemble and interpret such evidence—and I think this might be the crucial point—I permit it to shape a worldview, to build up an ontology that might accommodate what I have assembled. I feel as if I am trying to dream a sphere, or imagine Couliano’s fork. Kripal laments that today’s “conventional humanism” instead “reduc[es] extraordinary experience to social or historical contexts, biomedical, neurological, or evolutionary adaptive processes, or unconscious political mindsets.” He wants us to let such experiences “troubl[e] reality itself,” to render weird “space, time, and matter” (14). Curiously, scientists who work closely with the categories of space, time, and matter readily acknowledge how insanely weird they are, and well beyond our ken. I have found that humanists are among the most orthodox and repressive Flatlanders when it comes to these constitutive categories.

Kripal also wants us to take diversity seriously. He wants us to take diverse experiences, and the experiences of diverse peoples, seriously. If we truly value diversity, then let’s be open to the experiences of people across the blurry lines of race, gender, class, and sexuality, of people from across history and geography, of people who have been oppressed, or have oppressed others, both of whose experiences are shaped by dominant “regimes of truth.” What happens all too often, however, is that humanists celebrate human diversity, but then shoehorn those humans into “a flat white European metaphysics of materialism, historicism, scientism, and moralism, as if these people were nothing more than biomedical bodies, historical actors, and social animals” (15). This kind of reductionism of diverse human experience to a modern European explanatory framework strikes me as an act of contemporary colonialism: we will tell you who and what you really are. Kripal asks: “What of their souls? Of their supernatural experiences? Of their encounters with God? Of their miraculous saints? Of their psychoactive mushrooms and plant medicines? Of the nonhuman agents and spectral entities, the demonic angels, with whom they routinely interact in terror, healing, and transformation?” (15). The word I would underscore here is not so much “souls” but rather the possessive pronoun “their”: what of their experiences? Why can’t they possess their own experiences, and their own explanation for them? Why do we get to decide which experiences and explanatory frameworks are admissible? Again, Kripal: “To speak to my academic colleagues for a moment, we cannot go on and on about decolonizing this or that and then turn everyone into good Marxists, postcolonial materialists, or ironic postmoderns. That is not just morally wrong; it simply turns everyone else into some pale reflection of the Western academy.” In other words, it is imperative that we “tak[e] very seriously other people’s worlds” (15). And so, the “central claim of the superhumanities,” its “core idea goes like this: Pursue diversity until the end, make it more radical, render it ontological. In short, do not just decolonize history, religion, literature, or society, as academics like to say. Decolonize reality itself” (14).

Kripal is helped in his efforts by the anthropologist and cultural psychologist Richard A. Shweder, who, in his 1991 book Thinking through Cultures, argues that different peoples have what he calls different “reality posits,” that their distinctive cultures of belief and practice create different realities.¹⁴ Reality is plural because it is not one single objective world to be discovered, but a constellation of worlds created by different humans. “The real is plastic,” Kripal insists, and “different peoples actualize different truths and values, even different realities, to know and experience as ‘true.’ Truth is relative, then, not because there is no truth but because there is too much truth” (16).

It is common for today’s liberals (among whom I think I include myself), outraged by a “post-truth” political landscape exploited by the right to weaponize lies and false narratives, to blame some ill-defined “postmodernism” for our contemporary lack of faith in a single and stable truth. According to this line of argument, the political right learned how to doubt the truth by apprenticing itself to the political left: Derrida begat Dugin, or something to that effect. I don’t wish to be drawn into that debate, but I do think that the only way through a post-truth landscape is through it. Perhaps that is an inconvenient truth, but reality is rarely convenient.

Among the “experiencers” Kripal most wants us to take seriously are ourselves. Scratch just a bit and you will find that many (maybe most) scholars of religion have had anomalous experiences that, when conditions are ripe for honest disclosure, they admit (or only come to realize) have been formative but largely subterranean influences on their scholarship. And I should make clear that fleeing from such an experience—or denying its very possibility—is among the most common forms such influence takes. Kripal has written of his own extraordinary experiences, especially one on a night in Calcutta, and the ways in which it has echoed throughout the subsequent decades of his life, changing, as all past experiences do, as we carry them across the threshold of the present and into the future.¹⁵

In 2015, he invited me to a small conference at the Esalen Institute on the theme “The Furthest Reaches of the Imagination.” He asked all dozen or so of us participants, most of whom were scholars of religion, not to prepare a standard academic presentation, but instead to disclose an extraordinary, anomalous, inexplicable, even “impossible” experience, and then to forward a theory of the imagination that might help make sense of it. I can’t tell you who else was in that room, but you would recognize some of their names. It proved to be one of the most important gatherings I’ve ever attended. Many of the stories I heard told in that small room have stayed with me, as have the emotions of those who shared them: trepidation, embarrassment, excitement, relief, and awe—awe both at the stories themselves and at the insights that had dawned, or were dawning, on them as they shared those stories with others. Many had never shared these experiences beyond a partner or a close friend—certainly not with a group of peers.

I was in much the same position. In fact, when I received the invitation, my first thought was: I haven’t had any such experience that “qualifies.” I worried I was an experiential Flatlander. But then the first insight dawned: indeed, I did have such an experience, in fact two such experiences from my early 20s that formed a natural pair. But why had they been so hard to bring to the surface of consciousness, even when prompted by this invitation? Over time, I had told one or two people about both experiences. Otherwise, I harbored them in my heart, not knowing what to say or think about them. I still don’t, or at least I recognize that whatever I say or think about them will be provisional and will certainly change. As will my sense of their significance, because of course their significance—whatever they signal or point toward—will change as the landscape under my feet changes.

This is not the venue for me to write of those twin experiences. But I can share the theory of the imagination to which I turned in my attempt to accommodate them. I turned to the twentieth-century French philosopher of religion Henry Corbin and his theory of the “imaginal.” Corbin attempted to carve out a place for the imagination distinct from the dismissive connotations of the adjective “imaginary,” that is, fanciful or unreal. Corbin appealed to the Persian ishraqi, or “illuminationist” tradition, and the world of Hurqalya, assimilated to Avicenna’s intermediate world of active intelligences or angel-souls. This imaginal (but not imaginary) realm is real and understood to mediate to us a distant divine. The imaginal realm is peopled, as it were, with these intelligences that visit us, in forms and figures familiar to us from our own contexts and upbringings. In other words, our imaginations condition how the imaginal appears to us. According to Corbin, they often appear to us as visitors from the past, although this is an accommodation to our topography and temporality, not the topography and temporality proper to Hurqalya. He writes:

This synchronism results from a quantitative intensification which modifies temporal relations and is conceivable only in purely qualitative psychic time; in quantitative, continuous, and irreversible physical time such a bridging of distances is inconceivable. If, for example, you are chronologically separated from a spiritual master by several centuries, it is not possible for one of your contemporaries to bring you chronologically closer to him, as though he were that master’s sole intermediary in time. We cannot do away with the intervals of quantitative time that serve to measure historical events; but the events of the soul are themselves the qualitative measure of their own characteristic time. A synchronism impossible in historical time is possible in the tempus discretum of the world of the soul or of the ‘ālam al-mithāl. And this also explains how it is possible, at a distance of several centuries, to be the direct, synchronous disciple of a master who is only chronologically “in the past.”¹⁶

In Corbin’s words, “events of the soul” happen in their own space and time, and then like Couliano’s fork they intersect with and trouble the rules of our own. For Corbin, you might say that to take our extraordinary experiences seriously means to consider whether and how they are the appearance of something from outside our mundane reality (which, of course, we do not fully understand and is anything but mundane), how seemingly disparate phenomena might well be a single “event” from another, adjacent realm—call it “soul,” Hurqalya, or ‘ālam al-mithāl—reverberating through the space-time field of our perception and consciousness.

In recent years I have invested more time in Corbin: I taught a seminar on him during the pandemic and will do so again; several years ago the CSWR hosted a conference titled “Adventures in the Imaginal: Henry Corbin in the 21st Century”; and I have written essays and articles on him, and am even working on a translation of a collection of three late essays of his called The Paradox of Monotheism. I will conclude my review of Kripal’s Superhumanities, if indeed that is what this essay is, with an appeal to one of Corbin’s late writings, “Sophia Æterna.” There Corbin writes, “theology must become, or become once again, a science of experience, a science whose interest concerns most directly the destiny of each individual person . . . a science of life.”¹⁷ I suspect Corbin is speaking of “science” in the German sense of Wissenschaft, the rigorous pursuit of knowledge, learning, and scholarship that includes what in English we would call the sciences and the humanities. To say that theology, or more broadly the study of religion, needs once again to become a science of life, of experience, and of the individual is something of a provocation. Our individual lives and experiences are precisely what we are often asked to bracket in the pursuit of knowledge that alleges to be rigorous and objective. And the individual—well, individualism is often maligned today as a modern invention that champions reason over other ways of knowing, sovereign free will over contingency and necessity, atomized libertarian politics over collective action and contemplation, and of course the endless consumption and consumerism of capitalism. No doubt all those things are true, but so is this: none of those critiques can or will dispense with the individual, with the person, with the unique life and experience of each and every one of us. Because the person is not a modern invention: whatever it is, it is real, it is singular and multiple at the same time, and it has an enormously rich theory and practice behind it, and out in front of it, one that goes far beyond the modern West and includes all places, all positions, and all persons—not just the human ones, but the superhuman ones too.