What is Comparative Mysticism?
Comparative Mysticism is an academic field that studies and analyzes the mystical experiences, practices, and beliefs across different religious traditions. It seeks to identify similarities and differences in mystical phenomena, exploring how various cultures interpret and engage with the transcendent or divine. Rather than practicing mysticism itself, the field examines how mystics from Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Taoist, and indigenous traditions describe encounters with ultimate reality, and whether those descriptions point to shared experiences or fundamentally different phenomena.
The discipline sits at the intersection of religious studies, philosophy, psychology, and anthropology. Practitioners of comparative mysticism analyze primary texts—from Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle to the Upanishads, from Rumi’s poetry to the writings of Meister Eckhart—looking for structural patterns in contemplative paths, states of consciousness, and descriptions of union with the divine.
Origins & Lineage
The comparative study of mysticism began in the mid-19th century, with the development of the modern meaning of the word, which had begun to be used as a substantive, with the classification of “mystics” in the 17th century. This modern shift highlighted the personal experience of ultimate Reality, rather than the sociocultural context.
The study of this phenomenon tended in the early 20th century to focus on the psychology and the phenomenology of the personal experience, generally described as an altered state of consciousness with specific characteristics, processes, stages, effects, and stimulants. There has been a renewed scholarly interest in mysticism, as seen in the writings of William James, Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941), and William Inge (1860–1954). William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) pioneered psychological approaches, while Underhill’s greatest book, Mysticism: A Study of the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, was published in 1911.
These claims about mystics and mysticism make Underhill one of the first modern mystical “perennialists”, having identified, illustrated, and categorized common core mystical experiences across historical cultures and religious traditions some fifty years before the work of significant scholars of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Frithjof Schuon, Aldous Huxley, W. T. Stace, and Ninian Smart. The Perennial Philosophy is a 1945 comparative study of mysticism by the British writer and novelist Aldous Huxley. The Perennial Philosophy was published in 1945 immediately after the Second World War by Harper & Brothers in the United States (1946 by Chatto & Windus in the United Kingdom). Throughout the 1960s, the perennial philosophy was championed by figures such as Huston Smith and Ram Dass, both of them friends and fans of Huxley’s.
A critical turn arrived in 1978 when philosopher Steven Katz challenged perennialist assumptions in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. The other group has been termed, inter alia, constructivist, particularly since the last third of the twentieth century, and it has used comparison as a tool for accentuating the distinctions between mystical systems and demonstrating how dissimilar backgrounds lead to the construction of differing mystical constructs. Katz’s seminar work and its reception signified a constructionist turn in academic studies of mysticism with long-felt consequences and implications. In the post-Katz phase, discussions on mysticism were dominated by the perennialist/constructionist divide.
How It’s Practiced
Comparative mysticism is an analytical, not experiential, discipline. Scholars employ several methodologies:
Textual analysis: Close reading of mystical literature in original languages, tracing recurring metaphors (light, darkness, union, annihilation), structural stages (purgation, illumination, union), and epistemological claims about knowledge beyond discursive thought.
Phenomenological comparison: Mapping the reported contents of mystical states—loss of self-other distinction, sense of timelessness, noetic quality, ineffability—to determine whether mystics across traditions describe phenomenologically identical experiences.
Contextual interpretation: Despite the prevailing view that mystical traditions throughout the world are essentially similar, the presentation of the sources in this volume suggests that, in fact, the various traditions have distinct teachings and different metaphysical goals. Contextualist scholars examine how a Christian mystic’s theology of the Trinity shapes the experience of divine union differently than a Buddhist’s doctrine of emptiness.
Neuroscientific inquiry: Interest in the comparative study of mysticism has also extended into the area of neuroscience, where researchers explore electro-chemical brain states associated with mystical experience, in proposing evidence of a mystical neurological substrate.
Comparative Mysticism Today
The field remains contested but vibrant. Academic programs in religious studies and theology offer courses in mysticism and contemplative traditions. Steven T. Katz is Director of the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies at Boston University and holds the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish and Holocaust Studies. His Comparative Mysticism: An Anthology of Original Sources (2013) remains a standard text.
Contemporary scholars like Bernard McGinn have written comprehensive histories of Christian mysticism, while comparative theologians draw on mystical traditions to build interfaith dialogue. The perennialist/constructivist debate continues, with some scholars seeking middle positions that acknowledge both cultural specificity and cross-cultural patterns.
Outside academia, comparative mysticism influences spiritual seekers who study multiple traditions, retreat centers offering teachings from diverse lineages, and integral philosophers like Ken Wilber who map stages of consciousness across traditions.
Common Misconceptions
Comparative mysticism is not syncretism. The discipline studies mystical traditions comparatively; it does not blend them into a new hybrid practice or claim all paths are interchangeable.
It is not the perennial philosophy. While perennialism is one theoretical framework within comparative mysticism, the field encompasses multiple competing theories, including constructivism, which argues mystical experiences are irreducibly different across traditions.
It does not require mystical experience. Comparative mysticism is an academic discipline. Scholars need not be mystics any more than historians of war need to be soldiers.
It is not neutral description. All comparison involves theoretical commitments about what counts as mystical, which similarities matter, and how to interpret differences. The field debates these commitments openly.
It does not resolve theological disagreements. Contrary to what the perennialists suggest, there is no one underlying esoteric set of beliefs embedded in all traditional religions that all mystics share. Comparative mysticism describes and analyzes; it cannot adjudicate which tradition’s metaphysics is correct.
How to Begin
For academic study, start with Steven T. Katz’s Comparative Mysticism: An Anthology of Original Sources (Oxford, 2013), which presents primary texts with scholarly context. Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (1911) offers a perennialist perspective, readable and comprehensive despite its age. For the constructivist critique, read Steven Katz’s essay “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978).
Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions provides accessible introductions to mystical dimensions of each tradition. For primary sources, explore the Bhagavad Gita, The Cloud of Unknowing, Rumi’s Mathnawi, Ibn Arabi’s The Bezels of Wisdom, and the Platform Sutra of Huineng.
Universities offering courses include Harvard Divinity School, University of Chicago Divinity School, and Boston University’s Center for Judaic Studies. The American Academy of Religion hosts annual panels on mysticism and comparative theology.