Mysticism Buddhist and Christian: Encounters with Jan van Ruusbroec,
by PAUL MOMMAERS, JAN VAN BRAGT

Reviewed by  Roger Corless

The Journal of Religion
Vol.77 No.1 (Jan 1997)
pp.179-180

COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Chicago

            MOMMAERS, PAUL, and VAN BRAGT, JAN. Nanzan Studies in Religion and 
            Culture. New York: Crossroad, 1995.

            During his many years in Japan, Jan Van Bragt, the former director 
            of the Nanzan institute for Religion and Culture in Nagoya, has 
            tried to solve the koan, "How can such a natural affinity in 
            religiosity [between Buddhism and Christianity] result in such an 
            incurable disjunction in doctrine?" (p. 3). This volume is an 
            invitation to enter into that koan. It began as a series of seminars 
            at Nanzan, and, although the style is impeccably literary, it 
            retains something of the flavor of a conversation. Seven chapters on 
            Ruusbroec by Paul Mommaers (professor of theology at the University 
            of Antwerp and the University of Louvain) are "braided" p. 3) with 
            six chapters on Buddhist spirituality. 
            Mommaers's contribution is focused and detailed. He has given us a 
            major study of this important but (in the English-speaking world) 
            much neglected Christian mystic. Van Bragt ranges more widely, 
            concentrating on Japanese Zen but offering remarks on other forms of 
            Buddhism, Buddhism as a whole, Hinduism, and even "Eastern" 
            spirituality and mysticism (passim). This makes the "braiding" 
            somewhat less neat than it might have been but opens the book up to 
            a wider readership. The concern of both authors is similar, although 
            it is more muted in Mommaers and more explicit in Van Bragt--they 
            both speak explicitly as Christians sympathetic to Buddhism and 
            curious about how Ruusbroec and Buddhism can illuminate each other. 
            Van Bragt appears to have begun the seminars with the notion that 
            this was possible: Mommaers admits that he came around to Van 
            Bragt's view only after finishing the seminars. The discussion of 
            mutuality centers on the definition of mysticism (chaps. 1-4) and 
            the phenomenon of what Ruusbroec calls "natural mysticism" (chaps. 
            10-13). 
            The authors know well the literature on mysticism published in the 
            West and in Japan, and they summarize it topically as it relates to 
            Ruusbroec and Buddhism. It is at first taken for granted that 
            Ruusbroec is a mystic, and it is then asked whether Buddhism is 
            mystical. The objections of some Catholic and some Japanese Buddhist 
            scholars, that Christianity is intrinsically mystical but that 
            mysticism is alien to Buddhism, are considered, and the tables are 
            turned: Van Bragt argues that mysticism is "the true factor of 
            salvation [in Buddhism], while in Christianity salvation is a 
            question of faith" (p. 42). By this, he does not mean that faith is 
            absent in, or unimportant for, Buddhism--he devotes several pages to 
            the discussion of faith in Buddhism as a whole and in Pure Land 
            Buddhism in particular--but that the tendency to Oneness, which is 
            regarded as a key element in what is called mysticism, is more 
            native to Buddhism than to Christianity, with its insistence on a 
            transcendent Other called God. Therefore, mysticism is easily 
            accepted by Buddhism but has often been regarded with suspicion in 
            Christianity. 
            Natural mysticism is treated in the four last chapters of the book, 
            which are a kind of contrapuntal dance. Ruusbroec accepts that the 
            human can, by "turning inward," experience God and experience him 
            truly, and on that score he writes in praise of natural mysticism. 
            However, he sees, at the same time, clear and present dangers in 
            natural mysticism, which, if not enlivened and elevated by grace, 
            sinks into quietism and places the mystic in peril of hell. He 
            writes with passion, having in mind what he regards as the dire 
            heresies of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, whose laissez-faire 
            piety is redolent of present-day New Age spiritualities. (A 
            reminder, if any were needed, never to call anything new or modern, 
            since indeed Ruusbroec himself is recognized as the leader of the 
            Devotio Moderna!) This conflict between a quietist spirituality, 
            identified as bogus mysticism, and true mysticism, characterized as 
            activity-in-quiescence, is found to have a close parallel in 
            Buddhism, particularly in the Sudden and Gradual controversy, which 
            has produced a tension in Mahayana for much of its history, and in 
            the disputes in Japan between quiet sitting and "real" zazen. Van 
            Bragt concludes by saying that the discussion of natural mysticism 
            in Ruusbroec and Buddhism "provides a final nudge in the direction 
            of a positive answer" as to whether "Ruusbroec's mysticism and 
            Buddhist contemplation can really illuminate one another" (p. 286). 
            Chapters 5-9 discuss the nature of the human in Ruusbroec and 
            Buddhism. The sophisticated and nuanced argument can be summarized 
            by a quote from Ruusbroec: "In each new now, God is born in us" (p. 
            173). Ruusbroec's Christian doctrine of soul is surprisingly 
            resonant with Buddhist anatman.