Ecstatic Confessions is Martin Buber's unique, personal gathering of the testimonies of mystics throughout the centuries expressing their encounters with the divine. It features the author's seminal introduction to mysticism, "Ecstasy and Confession," which probes the nature of what Buber terms the "most inward of all experiences. . . . God's highest gift."
Buber sifted through texts from oriental, pagan, Gnostic, Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim sources down the centuries to cull those moving records that manage to convey some quality of an experience that is essentially beyond the power of words to capture. Ecstatic Confessions orchestrates these reports from the edge of human experience into a revealing look at the nature of the ecstatic experience itself and the tension arising from the mystic's compelling need to give witness to an event that can never truly be verbalized.
Ecstatic Confessions illuminates the intellectual development of its author even as it probes the almost insurmountable barrier between language and authentic mystical experience, which is, in essence, beyond the grasp of rational constructs.
Industry Reviews
First published in 1909, this brief, eclectic, appealing anthology, ably edited (by Paul Mendes-Flohr) and translated, makes a welcome addition to Buber's work in English. The four dozen or so excerpts from the writings of notable mystics span an immense historical and cultural territory, from the Mahabharata to Lao-Tse, from the Sufis to the Hasidim, from Plotinus to Anna Katharina Emmerich. There are, inevitably, may omissions (Francis of Assisi, Tauler, John of the Cross, Swedenborg, George Fox, etc.). More surprising, perhaps, is the very limited space allotted Jewish mystics, which may help revive Buber's reputation as a Jewish theologian best appreciated by Gentiles. (Mendes-Flohr, however, points out the ironic fact that although Hebrew was thought to be quite capable of expressing divine truth, it was a sacred language and thus unavailable as a vehicle for fantasy and intimate experience.) The most striking voices that Buber records belong to medieval Christian women, like Christina Ebner (d. 1355), who felt that she was pregnant with Jesus, or Jutzi Schulteiss (n.d.), who "had lost herself so completely that she did not know if she was human." Angela di Foligno (d. 1309) has a vision of Jesus saying, "You are I, and I am you." Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510) wished "to be changed completely into pure God." What does all this mean? Buber's Introduction is sober but suggestive. In their ecstasies, he argues, mystics experience the "unity of the l." But in being swept above and beyond the "multiplicity. . .of the senses and of thought," the ecstatic is also cut off from language, whence the stammering inadequacy of these sometimes very powerful narratives. "We listen to our inmost selves," Buber writes, " - and do not know which sea we hear murmuring." A stimulating presentation for non-specialists. (Kirkus Reviews)
