Nomad Thought: Using Gregory of Nyssa and Deleuze and Guattari to Deterritorialize Mysticism

Abstract

This article compares the mysticism of 4th-century Church Father Gregory of Nyssa to the nomadology of 20th century philosophers Deleuze and Guattari. In their book A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari returned to the figure of the nomad in order to free multiplicities from the “despotic unity” of modern Enlightenment thought. Though Deleuze and Guattari compare this nomadology to spiritual journeys, they claim that their nomad, unlike the mystic, resists a center, a homecoming, a destination. Yet Gregory of Nyssa, writing before the Church itself became a hegemonic power that would confine truth to a single reified code, described the Christian as a wandering nomad, for whom the path itself is the goal. Contrary to the static vision that would be developed in the onto-theological tradition that would lead Western metaphysics to interpret mysticism as the private experience of union with the divine, Gregory of Nyssa proposes a communal movement “from beginning to beginning” with no end, and no union in sight. By placing the postmodern secular nomad alongside the premodern Christian nomad, this article will draw on similarities between the two in order to accentuate the contemporary relevance of Gregory of Nyssa’s vision of mysticism.