The Prophetic and the Mystical: Heiler Revisited

Friedrich Heiler’s Classic essay on prayer — Das Gebet — first appeared in 1919: several times reprinted and revised, with an abbreviated translation into English published in 1931, this vastly influential work helped to popularize and to fix in the theological mind a sharp distinction between two antithetical styles of spirituality, the ‘mystical’ and the ‘prophetic’. The distinction owed something to William James, something to a group of Lutheran scholars interested in the history and phenomenology of religion, of whom the most significant is probably the great Nathan Söderblom (whose general influence upon Heiler is very considerable). Heiler enumerates a variety of ways in which what he and his teachers thought of as a basic polarity in religion might be characterized — as a tension between the healthy and the diseased, the active and the passive, or (with Söderblom) between a mysticism of the affirmation of personality and a mysticism of the denial of personality. For Söderblom, this ran parallel to the distinction between ‘salvation-religions’, with the notion of escape or release at their centre, and religions of revelation and prophecy. For Seeberg, working in the same tradition, it was the gulf between the ‘contemplative’ and the ‘voluntarist’ approaches. Heiler, understandably, sees no point in speaking of two kinds of mysticism here, and so frames his own version of the confrontation in terms simply of the mystical in general (understood as involving ‘radical denial of the world and the ego’) and the ‘prophetic’; and he proceeds to develop a detailed and intriguing typology of spiritualities, which has remained probably the most influential section of his work.