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| Late 15th or early 16th century French manuscript of The Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite Porete |
The mystic is the enemy of the Church and institutions of governance and extraction because they practice unification with God and thus cannot be subject to the techniques of destablisation that characterise everything from language to roles, tasks, morals, names, attributes and so on. These attributes - all derivative from original sin - are always fictional and impossible to achieve or coincide with, and therefore leave the subject in a state of constant uncertainty and instability.
Institutions of governance, which are always institutions of existential economy, are concerned primarily with the destablising and disorienting act, but will also provide the means, through a form of economy which constantly extracts and exploits at the same time that it provides a remedy to the crisis. Often, the remedy itself is in fact the source of the crisis of stability, orientation, and presence. The latter is clear in the example of national identity, or parenthood, where one can never fully identify with, or live up to many of its supposed ideals and associations, and yet they cling to these 'refuges' or shells at the same time to get a sense of orientation and distinct presence in the world.
Mystics are heretics because in order unify with that which is ineffable, transcendent, and thus absolutely stable, one must develop a clearly defined practice that takes them to the edge of their sense of presence or distinctness as a being. Mystics unify with, or are absorbed into god's presence, god simply being the unknowable, ineffable totality. They shed all of their offices, stations, predicates, and therefore they approach a kind of stability in emptiness and detachment, which flips into a wholeness and belonging, in a total unknowing which flips into a knowing. They thus inhabit a marriage of opposites, syncretically, where neither one nor the other can reach some kind of final state of resolution or realisation, but can only approach each other together.
