CFP: Mystical Atheism

Paper submissions are invited for the special issue/collection of Topoi entitled: Mystical Atheism. The special issue aims to bring together an international group of scholars to explore the novel view of mystical atheism in comparative philosophy of religion.

In light of the publication of Brook Ziporyn’s new work, Experiments in Mystical Atheism: Godless Epiphanies from Daoism to Spinoza and Beyond, this special issue offers a series of in-depth discussions and critiques of this novel synthesis of mysticism and atheism. Mystical atheism involves a kind of atheist perennialism, arguing that a uniquely atheistic form of mysticism emerged at different times and places throughout the history of religious thought. Those regarded as constituting the team of mystical atheists includes, at least, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Bataille in the West, and classical Daoism and Tiantai Buddhism in the East.

What all these figures share is, on the one hand, a rejection of a metaphysics of the divine that upholds the ultimacy of rational free agency in the form of a projected perfect person, as in the Abrahamic traditions. On the other hand, these figures also each offer something like an affirmative pantheistic theology that identifies the infinity and indeterminateness of all things with so many expressions of a naturalistic divinity. Mystical atheism has also been labelled ‘Emulative Atheism.’ The therapeutic and salvific upshot of the view is thus that we are meant to emulate such accomplished mystical atheists, becoming one with the omnipresence of purposelessness and non-personhood like they have.

What this special issue does is ask if this notion of mystical atheism is coherent. Do all these figures constitute a recognizable, though perhaps subterranean, trajectory in the global history of religious thought? Does it makes sense to combine mysticism and atheism? What is the mystery to experience in a world devoid of the ultimacy of a perfect person? Is the ultimacy of the divine best understood in terms of the raw infinity of indefinite determinability? How could such figures all end up arguing for a similar metaphysics of the divine mostly unbeknownst to each other? What is the precise relationship between mystical atheism and alternative concepts of God like pantheism, panentheism, ultimism, and developmental theism? Is mystical atheism a kind of religious anti-realism, naturalism, or fictionalism? These are just some of the question this special issue will address.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Mystical atheism/atheist mysticism

• Comparative philosophy of religion

• Alternative metaphysics of the divine

• Denial of divine personhood and teleology

• Atheist perennialism

• Omnipresence