What is mystery?
Mystery is an opportunity to recognize and value ignorance as an invitation to enter more deeply into question without the promise of an answer. It celebrates the tension of knowledge and ignorance as collaborators and comrades; they are not opposites and certainly not enemies. Mystery is held together by their shared interest, which is best felt in the strain that wonder creates: the perception that what we know is dwarfed by an ever-expanding universe of what we do not know. To consider a mystery is to look humbly and curiously into a question’s depths.
Photo by Harpreet Singh Grewal on Unsplash
There's a lot to unpack from that opening salvo. I'll begin by saying that my understanding of mystery has changed significantly from my childhood where mysteries were fun stories to crack. Think Frank and Joe Hardy, Nancy Drew. I read them all. Or listened to them on the radio. The local Christian radio station in Sarasota always had story time in the late afternoon—”WKZM, 105.5 on the FM dial”—and the Sugar Creek Gang figured prominently among the featured readings. In this genre, a puzzle or unexplainable crime presented itself, and we had to find clues and “crack the case.”
These books gave way to mystery movies later on like M. Night Shyamalan. He's "the guy who makes scary movies with a twist." After the twist, the scare is gone, and everything makes sense. Go back and watch The Sixth Sense again, and you’ll notice every detail—the odd and banal—constructing the answer. Yes, the tension of mystery was always waiting to be destroyed with a know-it-all perception, which meant that you only ever read or watched a mystery story once: a second reading was pointless.
Night Shyamalan, M. (1999). The Sixth Sense. Buena Vista Pictures.
The 2016-17 academic school year is ground zero for mystery’s reconfiguration in my life, and it’s the kind of change that revealed to me the poverty of the modern use as a whodunit genre of stories. I felt cheated. Swindled. Hoodwinked. (What a delicious adjective!) Mystery certainly did not level up by entering the world of young adult fiction.
Here’s how it all happened. I had taken over the large lecture classes for the Classics Department at Iowa because the former professor moved back to Greece on short notice a month or two before classes. I was a freshly minted PhD, having defended in March and graduated in May, so the job was a welcome relief even if I initially felt overwhelmed writing twice-weekly lectures for an auditorium filled with 300 students. Ancient mystery religions emerged as part of our study of the myths of Demeter. She's the goddess of grain and harvest in Greek mythology. Most know her by her Latin name Ceres, which is where we get the word "cereal." Don't need to explain that correlation, but I do love that my two-year-old Eden's "cereal" sounds more like "Sherah." Imagining this Olympian in a 1980s superhero guise is titillating, to say the least. You can't talk about Demeter without talking about the Eleusinian mysteries, and we learned about the mystery cult that took place yearly at Eleusis and saw that the language of the Eleusinian mysteries made their way into the New Testament.
Here are a couple of facts I learned about the Eleusinian mysteries that will help us move forward together.
Eleusis was an ancient city on the road from Athens to Corinth, being only fourteen miles from Athens and just over 37 miles from Corinth.
"Mystery" comes from mystēs, which may mean "covered."
The Eleusinian mysteries were concerned with agriculture, particularly the corn harvest.
The grain or seed image figures prominently in the art associated with the mystery cult as a symbol of resurrection and the afterlife.
A 55-day truce was held every year to ensure that all Greek-speaking peoples who were not murderers could attend if they wanted.
The revelation of the sacred objects involved pyrotechnics and a proclamation by the priest called a hierophant.
Divulging the mysteries carried the penalty of death.
For me, the New Testament was fairly well-charted territory. I’m not a New Testament scholar, but I “knew a lot of Bible” from growing up within the conservative Mennonite denomination. Plus, I had gone on to earn a BA in Religious Studies, which is more or less "New Testament" when religion is studied at a Baptist institution. Studies, however, felt two-dimensional: I knew the stories and saw them at work in the local church. Koine Greek provided a third dimension with its granular perspective of the ancient culture while simultaneously fubar-ing any silly notion of thinking “I’m gonna know exactly what the writers said” by introducing me to the literal, visible cluster that the apparatus criticus is. Answering a question was like cutting off the head of Hydra: I couldn’t hide from the questions, but answering one produced more. Questions became life-giving fractals of conversation, and the language of Scripture an invitation to appreciate and relish the ubiquitous complexity of humanity relating to the divine.
St. Paul passed through Eleusis when traveling from Corinth to Athens on his second missionary journey (see map below), and he was in the neighborhood of Eleusis on his third missionary journey, too. The prominence of the Eleusinian mysteries in this part of the Greek world would have been difficult for any passerby to avoid, much less someone who reaches for any possible connection in his lust to convert everyone he meets to this newfound faith. Read Acts 17 where Paul doesn't shirk from the plethora of altars and deities but uses it as a platform to inform the Athenians that this altar they've built is really for the incarnate God. Paul’s ballsy, to put it mildly, and the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers laugh him out of town. Fast-forward to when he needs to write to the rascally Corinthians and you find him doing a typical Pauline thing: he snatches up the imagery of the Eleusinian mysteries to explain the resurrection of Christ (15.1-11), the Christian resurrection of the dead (15.12-34), and the resurrected body (15.35-58). The final section finds him declaring "Look! I'm telling you a mystery (15.51 μυστήριον)!"
St. Paul passed through Eleusis when traveling from Corinth to Athens on his second missionary journey, and he passed close by on his third.
But so what. Why does this matter? That’s what I was struggling with one afternoon while preparing for a 50-minute lecture on the Eleusinian mysteries. I felt lost. I saw the overlapping imagery and stories and interest in the afterlife between novel Christianity and ancient Hellenistic culture, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it all. Fortunately, a good friend of mine, Tyler Fyotek, was among my TAs that year because he was finishing his dissertation and needed a lighter teaching load. He said this, which not only summarized eloquently what the textbook was trying to say but also created the frame that allowed me to understand what I knew of the New Testament, Greek religion, and the Greek language a lot more clearly: "Michael, mystery is a vehicle for understanding something that hasn't been experienced yet."
Ah. Sweet eureka.
This was the lens that brought several images into focus. For example, Paul’s Greek audience is consumed with the anxiety of what happens after death, a topic that doesn’t register in the Hebrew Bible. Moses isn't concerned about the afterlife. Neither are Isaiah or Jeremiah. The minor prophets are so caught up in the justice of the present to really give a damn about what happened later, which is why the civil rights movement found fertile ground there for social justice in the 1960s. But for his Greek audience, Paul hijacks the language of the Eleusinian mysteries to quiet their fears:
"We will not all perish, but we will all be transformed in a moment, in the blink of an eye, at the last trumpet blast. It will sound, and the dead will be raised immortal, and we shall be transformed." (1 Corinthians 15.52)
The language of the mystery cult was powerful enough to imagine Christ-followers rising as new creatures with new bodies at Christ's return.
I’ve noticed that in today’s world, where the "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR) is expanding while the religious is contracting, the language of mystery is common ground for the religious and the SBNR. The religious do so because . . . well, they have to. It shows up in their sacred texts and cannot be ignored even if the language is off-putting or annoying. The SBNR do, I think, because they find comfort in the acknowledged ignorance that mystery affords as a referendum on some Christianities’—evangelicalism’s, in particular—hyper-fixation on certitude.
Certitude’s answers are too small.
Mystery does not assume that we know certainly. In fact, mystery demands that we value what we do not know more than what we do. I struggle to find a better synopsis of what mystery affords than St. Paul—yes, him again—at 1 Corinthians 13.12: "Right now, we are looking through a mirror at an enigma but eventually face to face. Now I know just a fraction, but then I will know fully just as I have been fully known." Mystery—especially within the context of faith—values "what is not known" as an invitation to deepen our appreciation of a question without certitude.
βλέπομεν γὰρ ἄρτι δι’ ἐσόπτρου ἐν αἰνίγματι, τότε δὲ πρόσωπον πρὸς πρόσωπον• ἄρτι γινώσκω ἐκ μέρους, τότε δὲ ἐπιγνώσομαι καθὼς καὶ ἐπεγνώσθην.
~ St. Paul (1 Cor. 13.12)
Therefore, humility is key, but not some shame-induced, head-bent-low image of worthlessness and indignity that humility is often cracked up to be. Nope. Humility is the ability to declare with Socrates, "I know that I don't know." In this tension of knowledge and ignorance, a person can find the twin sisters of humility and wonder leading them deeper into the questions that we’re all curious about and terrified to ask.
Mystery demands courage. "We imperfectly know, and we imperfectly prophecy, but the 'imperfectly' will fall away whenever perfection comes." Also from 1 Corinthians 13.
I have found within the language of mystery the power to describe the experience of faith more accurately. In an age when “faith” is equated with “certainty,” the language of mystery celebrates the absence of certainty as a process of humanity attempting to articulate carefully, humbly, and courageously the limitations of its abilities to know the infinite treasures of the universe.
