The Words We Use to Talk
About Our Inner Worlds

July 14, 2007

This past year I had the experience of talking through Sufi mystical systems with a young man who may someday be a Lutheran minister in the Missouri Synod. I found it disorienting to talk about a religious system within the context of another system.. trying to align terms or find dissimilarities. The experience illustrated for me the importance of the words we use to talk about the events that happen inside our minds.

Sufism emphasizes (like many mystical systems) the gradual, approach to God. There are technical terms to describe the stages of this approach. We could say that being a Sufi means to talk about internal experience with certain words. Note the following passages from the Sufi/psychologist al-Qushayri (d. 1074):

A certain shaykh said: "The journey of the seekers ends with victory over their selves. When they are victorious over their selves, they have arrived. The master... said: "He means the retreat of the control of the mortal human and seizing of control by sovereign reality. If a servant can remain in such a condition, he possesses fixity." [Early Islamic Mysticism, pg. 136]

The "journey" points to the approach to God. The journey is presented by al-Qushayri as a loss of the self's control over one's self. By the end "sovereign reality" has taken control. This final state is then affixed with a technical term: "fixity".

The Lutheran young man read this material through his own vocabulary of internal events. In this case it was dominated by the concept of sin and justification.. and a wariness of mystical turns. It is possible to imagine someone drawn to the monastic life.. like Thomas Merton.. finding common group with Sufism. But a confident Lutheran seems miles away; for the most part the vocabulary does not coalesce.

How should we think about these different vocabularies of the internal world. One way would be to figure out which one really does describe the internal events of the mind. But it strikes me that these vocabularies are all correct. The words themselves construct the cultural lens through which the world is perceived and through which individuals makes sense of internal events. No linguistic system can ever be "correct". Whether we are talking about Sufis or Lutherans.. or Freudians or postmoderns—the systems create the perception of life.

These religious/cultural psychological vocabularies can be termed a folk psychology. Jerome Bruner writes:

The... view I am proposing is that it is culture, not biology, that shapes human life and the human mind, that gives meaning to action by situating its underlying intentional states in an interpretive system. It does this by imposing the patterns inherent in the culture's symbolic systems—its language and discourse modes, the forms of logical and narrative explication, and the patterns of mutually dependent communal life. [Acts of Meaning, pg. 34]

What I take from Bruner is that human beings have a certain number of raw internal states and a level of intentional acting, but these internal things are always bound up within a vocabulary of meaning and explanation. That vocabulary for understanding our interior world—for creating a folk psychology—is a product of religion.

What does this do to the study of religion? Clearly, it is not a matter of deciding which vocabulary is correct.. every vocabulary works. The ancient Egyptians held views about psychology that we would consider to be absurd, but clearly ancient Egyptians functioned. But further, this view of religion allows us to place theology in a proper context. Theology provides the terms and concepts that allow us to understand how a particular historical individual viewed and experienced the world. As such, theology is indispensable. What can be ditched is the idea of constructive theology in which modern theologians sit around mixing and matching ideas to come up with some new way to understand the world or scripture. Such theological work forms no folk psychology.. and its fate will be to gather dust. I would rather watch a few episodes of Oprah Winfrey than read a brilliant tome of constructive theology.