SOURCE: Hussey, Andrew. “‘The Pathless Path’: Christian Influences on the Language and Process of Inner Experience.” In The Inner Scar: The Mysticism of Georges Bataille, pp. 37-53. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000.

In the following essay, Hussey addresses the ways in which Bataille employed traditional elements of Western thought in his development of a theory of spiritual experience.

I pray God that he may quit me of God

—Meister Eckhart, Sermons

The fact that the title of La Somme athéologique is borrowed from Aquinas' Summa Theologiae indicates how Bataille, although working beyond Christianity, still centres his language and thinking on the Western tradition. Similarly, although inner experience may borrow from the language of Christian mysticism, and in this sense parody it, Bataille still remains faithful to the distinction which Aquinas makes between direct experience of God and writing about this experience.¹

More specifically, in the same way that Aquinas sought...