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The Call, Community, and Class: Feminist Frustrations with the Language of No-Self

In this essay, Mary Engel has taken up what I believe to be one of the most difficult tasks in the academic study of religion in her attempt to explain exactly what mystics are talking about when they utilize the language of no-self as they try to describe their experience of oneness or communion with the divine. Further, she questions if feminism and mysticism are compatible. How can it be, she seems to be asking, that in order to be truly, wholly spiritually fulfilled we are to deny our very selves, as mystical rhetoric seems to assert. For if feminism is grounded on the assertion and development of women’s selfhood and spirituality/mysticism is grounded on the denial of that self, the two appear to be incommensurate. Ultimately, she argues that feminists can (and should?) utilize this mystical language of no-self in order to fashion a “new vision” that includes both active, public work and individual spirituality and that allows one to experience “no-self in relation to the One.” My first thoughts when reading this essay centered on Engel’s construction of the goals of feminism and her preoccupation with finding her true calling. In regard to the former, it is certainly true that much feminist thought and theory of the past forty years has focused on the liberation of women from the bondage of a variety of oppressions and the subsequent development of women’s full moral agency and subjectivity. However, this is definitely not the whole story. One key movement that has been made is the theoretical exploration of the subject, of identity, in light of the historical construction of the self.1 While early stages of this attempt focused on the differences between the “feminine” relational self as opposed to the autonomous, rational “male” self, more recent attempts have moved beyond this binary to the much more complex construction of the “postmodern” self. This move to the postmodern self is one that might alleviate some of Engel’s anxieties, at least theoretically, as it embraces the notion of the nonessential “nature” of the self, or, as she might say, the “noselfness” of the self. But this is a move that Engel does not make as she seems to hold on tightly to the more typical modern construction of the self in her desire to be an “active, free, responsible, and gloriously individual self” (146). With one core identity and indeed one core “calling” to live out, such a self, perhaps, cannot but run up against the rigid boundaries that keep it from experiencing the ecstasy of communion and even union with the divine other. To be perfectly honest, I empathize with Engel’s depiction of her spiritual