What might be the most fruitful avenues for new research on emotions within mysticism? How might that research benefit from the enormously increased attention to emotion over the past forty years in a wide range of humanities, social science, and life science fields (including cognitive science, sociology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, literature, history, religious studies)? Any attempt to address these questions must acknowledge at the outset that emotion, like mysticism, is a term of relatively recent invention, and that like mysticism, the term emotion is notoriously difficult to define and to situate culturally and historically. If this volume as a whole demonstrates that mysticism is a capacious category rather than a tightly defined and universally applicable term, then this chapter aims to do the same work for emotions. In the process, though I will never entirely abandon the term emotions, I will also use terms such as affect, excitation, passion, and feeling where these allow a closer engagement with writers of the past.

Attuning ourselves to the terms mystical writers themselves used to talk about feeling will be especially important because of an insight that recent researchers often seem to think is fresh and new, but that many medieval thinkers certainly shared: as any attempt to make analytic distinctions between aspects of human functioning such as memory, reason, will, bodily sensation, and emotion must acknowledge, even as it artificially separates these processes, these operations are radically interactive, deeply mutually enmeshed. Even if medieval theorists assign functions to separate faculties given specific locations in the soul or body (e.g., the will, the imagination, and the common sense), they never suggest that any of these faculties might operate in isolation: feeling involves sensory as well as emotional and cognitive aspects, for example; excitation is a physical as well as emotional, volitional, and intellectual response; and passion is a general term for sensations or effects the body or mind undergoes, in contrast to its own self-initiated actions.