The word metanoia is usually translated as repentance, but its older sense is simpler: a change of mind, a turning of the whole understanding.11 From the Greek μετάνοια, composed of meta (“after”, “beyond”) and noein (“to perceive, to think”). We chose it as the name of this journal because the traditions we study describe exactly such a turning: not the acquisition of one more piece of information, but a change in the one who knows. This essay sets out the question that change raises, the question this journal exists to ask.
Most of what we call knowledge has a simple shape. There is a knower, there is something known, and there is a relation between them: a belief that is true, a perception that is accurate, a skill that works. The knower stays where they are; the known stays over there. Even our most intimate knowledge, of a friend or a piece of music, keeps something of this distance. We know about things, and we know things, but we remain ourselves while we know them.
Philosophers have long distinguished between kinds of knowledge that do not fit this shape equally well. Bertrand Russell separated knowledge by description, which is knowledge that something is the case, from knowledge by acquaintance, which is direct awareness of something without the mediation of any inference.22 Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910–11). Acquaintance comes closer to what the contemplatives describe, but it still keeps a subject facing an object. The knowledge they speak of claims to go further: to a knowing in which the distance between knower and known is overcome, so that to know the real is in some sense to be it, or to be one with it.
By unitive knowledge we mean that claimed knowledge: knowledge by union. The phrase is ours, but the claim is not. It appears, in different vocabularies and with different emphases, in the Upaniṣads and the schools of Vedānta, in Plato and the Neoplatonists, in Christian, Jewish and Islamic mysticism, in the Daoist classics and in several schools of Buddhism. It appears in texts written centuries and continents apart by people who could not have read one another.
A few examples show how varied the witnesses are. The Chāndogya Upaniṣad teaches a young man that the finest essence of all things is his own self, and ends each lesson with the refrain tat tvam asi, “that thou art” (Müller 1879, Chāndogya 6.8.7). We read that sentence closely elsewhere in this issue. Plotinus, teaching in Rome in the third century, describes the soul’s return to its source as a vision in which seer and seen are no longer two, and his editor Porphyry reports that Plotinus reached that union four times in the years they spent together (Plotinus 1917, Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 23).
In the fourteenth century Meister Eckhart told his congregations that the eye with which one sees God is the same eye with which God sees one: one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.33 German Sermon 12 in Josef Quint’s numbering. The translation is ours. The anonymous English author of The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that God may be reached by love but never by thought, and asks the reader to put every creature beneath a “cloud of forgetting” (The author of The Cloud of Unknowing 1912, ch. 5–6). And al-Ghazālī, after a crisis that took him from the most prestigious teaching post of his age, wrote that the Sufi path could not be learned from books, only tasted; that knowing the definition of drunkenness is not being drunk (al-Ghazālī 1909, on the Sufis).
It would be easy to conclude from such a list that all these traditions are saying the same thing. We do not claim that, and the reasons matter for everything that follows.
First, the traditions disagree, often sharply, about what is known in unitive knowledge. For Advaita Vedānta, what is realized is the identity of the self with Brahman, the one reality without a second. For Christian mystics in the mainstream of their tradition, union with God is a union of love and will in which the creature remains a creature. For Madhyamaka Buddhism, the insight that frees is insight into emptiness, the absence of any intrinsic nature, including in any supposed absolute. These are not three words for one thing. Some of the longest and most careful arguments in the history of thought have been conducted between people who each spoke of union.
Second, the modern study of mysticism has itself divided on this question. William James gave the classic account of mystical states as ineffable, noetic, transient and passive, and was inclined to find a common core in them (James 1902, lectures XVI–XVII). Aldous Huxley gathered sayings from many traditions into a single “perennial philosophy” (Huxley 1945). Later scholars, notably Steven Katz, argued that there are no unmediated experiences: that what a mystic experiences is shaped from the start by the concepts and practices of the mystic’s tradition, so that a Christian and a Buddhist contemplative do not have the same experience and then describe it differently.44 Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism”, in Katz (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1978). Robert K. C. Forman and others replied that some contemplative states are empty of content altogether, and so cannot be shaped by concepts in that way: see Forman (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 1990). Others replied that some states described in the literature are empty of content altogether. The debate is not settled.
Third, we do not claim that unitive knowledge is real in the sense its witnesses intend. That is one of the questions, not an assumption. A journal that took the answer for granted would have nothing to ask. We take the reports seriously as reports: careful, often reluctant descriptions by intelligent people of something they held to be the most important thing they knew. What those reports show, and what they do not, is the matter under study.
If the traditions disagree, and the scholars disagree about the traditions, why frame a journal around a single question? Because the resemblances are as real as the differences, and they are strange. People who never met, working within incompatible doctrines, describe the same movements: a turning inward, a letting go of images and concepts, a knowledge that is not about anything, a self that is found by being lost. They reach for the same paradoxes and the same negations. They warn against the same mistakes.
A resemblance of that kind calls for explanation. Perhaps it reflects a shared structure of human consciousness; perhaps a shared reality that consciousness can meet; perhaps the shared problems of any disciplined attempt to speak about the limits of speech. The explanations are not exclusive, and each has consequences. To ask which of them is true is to ask some of the oldest questions in philosophy and religion: what is ultimately real, what the self is, and whether knowledge can transform the knower. Those are the Great Questions that run through this site.
Because the subject invites confusion between what happened, what a text says, what scholars argue and what we ourselves think, every page on this site marks what kind of statement it is making. A historical note records events and dates. A primary passage quotes a text, and names its translator. A scholarly note reports scholarship, including its disagreements. A note from Metanoia is our own view, offered for argument. When we paraphrase, we cite the passage; when we quote, we quote a published translation or give our own, and say which.
We write for readers who are not specialists but are willing to read slowly. Terms from Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew and Chinese are given in a scholarly transliteration and explained where they first appear; each has a page in the Library, with its uses in each tradition. Where the scholarship is contested we say so. Where we do not know, we say that too.
Unitive knowledge, if the witnesses are right, cannot be had by reading about it. None of them thought that reading was useless. They wrote, after all, and some of them wrote a great deal. They thought it could prepare, clarify and warn. That is what a journal can do, and it is the most we hope for this one: to prepare the ground for a change of mind, and to be honest about what we find there.
Notes
1.From the Greek μετάνοια, composed of meta (“after”, “beyond”) and noein (“to perceive, to think”). Back
2.Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910–11). Back
3.German Sermon 12 in Josef Quint’s numbering. The translation is ours. Back
4.Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism”, in Katz (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 1978). Robert K. C. Forman and others replied that some contemplative states are empty of content altogether, and so cannot be shaped by concepts in that way: see Forman (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 1990). Back
Plotinus. The Enneads. Translated by Stephen MacKenna. Published in five volumes, 1917–1930. Medici Society, London, 1917. Porphyry, Life of Plotinus 23.