Experience, language, and Christian mysticism: Dialogue between the mystical dimension and spiritual experience in the work of Michel de Certeau and the current challenges of Latin American theology and spirituality.

Abstract

This article asks how the mystical dimension and spiritual experience in Certeau's work dialogue with the current challenges of Latin American spirituality and theology. The text aims to establish a critical dialogue between Michel de Certeau's analysis of mysticism and the current challenges of Latin American Spirituality (LAS) and Theology (LAT). Certeau's work highlighted the singularities of 16th- and 17th-century mysticism and spirituality by showing how the practices of certain groups and individuals differed markedly from the predominant trends in the religious and cultural sphere of the time: Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. Many of his categories, approaches, and methodologies can be adapted to the analysis of Latin American theology in the 20th and 21st centuries because, on the one hand, its internal dynamics fall within the boundary between the renovating imprint of the Second Vatican Council and the currents that attempt to confine its impact to the approaches that predominate in Europe and the First World. To this end, he takes Certeau's categories on mysticism—understood as a practice of enunciation or ‘modus loquendi’ that arises from a crisis and focuses on the absence of God—and attempts to show that they are relevant to understanding Latin American spirituality. TLA is defined by its preferential option for the poor as a place of enunciation and by orthopraxis (transformative action) over orthodoxy, elements that are analyzed as ‘mystical operations’ of articulation between contemplation and commitment. Ultimately, Certeau's analysis offers epistemological validation for TLA by resisting rationalism and privileging the otherness and historicity of the experience of faith.