“Mystery” here does not mean a secret, an unresolved question, an intrigue or a riddle (as in fiction).
In philosophy, “mystery” designates a notion beyond ordinary human understanding, requiring a deeper, intuitive approach.
In a spiritual or religious context, “mystery” refers to a divine truth or reality.
Once it has been grasped by direct intuition, it is not incomprehensible but relatively inexpressible, difficult to communicate to someone who has not undergone the same intuition — beyond the strictly conceptual: the intelligible.
More precisely
A mystery is not the unknowable, but a mode of knowledge that exceeds discursive reasoning.
What is mysterious is supra-intelligible: accessible to intellect (in the metaphysical sense), yet not reducible to concepts.
Its “inexpressibility” does not stem from the mystery itself, but from the limitation of language, which can only convey suprarational realities analogically.
The mystery is not absurd: it is beyond concepts.
In the Christian tradition, a mystery is a divine reality in which humans may participate by grace: Trinity, Incarnation, Eucharist…
One receives a real contact, but conceptual expression can only provide a partial, symbolic, analogical formulation.
For Dionysius the Areopagite, God exceeds all affirmation and all negation:
theology is both cataphatic (affirmative) and apophatic (via negation).
Mystery can only be approached through a unitive knowledge, beyond the subject–object divide.
Hence, a mystery differs from:
— a riddle, which may be solved,
— a secret, which may be revealed,
— ignorance, which may be dispelled.
The mystery is that which, in manifesting itself, surpasses the mind even as it illumines it.
Knowledge of mystery is an experience: it involves interiority and transformation.
It is also participatory: to know a mystery is to enter into communion with a reality greater than oneself.
For further reading
- Plato, Symposium; Phaedo — On access to intelligible and supra-discursive realities.
- Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology — Foundation of the apophatic approach to mystery.
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, qq. 1–13 — On the articulation of reason, revelation, and mystery.
- Pascal, Pensées — On the disproportion between God and humanity and knowledge through the heart.
- Jean Borella, Amour et Vérité (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2011) — On symbol as an access to the mysterious.
- Bruno Bérard, Metaphysics for Everyone (Angelico Press) ; fr. Métaphysique pour tous (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2022); it. Sui sentieri della metafisica; es. ¿Qué es la metafísica? de. Was ist Metaphysik?
On mystery, intellectual intuition, and supra-discursive knowledge.