Sajkaca - Mystics and Mysticism

ONE of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type, of religion; that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong. Yet, as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the . .’ corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.

In the true mystic, who is so often and so wrongly called a “religious individualist:’ we see personal religion raised to its highest power. If we accept his experience as genuine, it involves an intercourse with the spiritual world, an awareness of it. which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. The mystic speaks with God as a person with a Person, and not as a member of a group. He lives by an immediate knowledge far more than by belief; by a knowledge achieved in those hours of direct, unmediated intercourse with the Transcendent when, as he says, he was” in union with God.” The certitude then gained-a certitude which he cannot impart, and which is not generally diffused-governs all his reactions to the Universe. It even persists and upholds him in those terrible hours of darkness when all his sense of spiritual reality is taken away.

Such a personality as this seems at first sight to stand in little need of the support which the smaller nature, the more languid religious consciousness, receives from the corporate spirit. By the very term “mystic” .we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. I think that much of the distrust with which he is often regarded comes from this sense of his independence of the herd; his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I saw,” said David; and those who did not see can only preserve a respectful or an exasperated silence.

Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Even those who have broken away from the churches that reared them, have quickly drawn to themselves disciples, and become the centres of new groups. Surely, therefore, it is worth while to examine, if we can, the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the groupconsciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?

As to the first question: What is it that the corporate life does for the great spiritual genius ?-for I think that we may allow the great mystic to be that. First, and most obviously, it gives him a favorable environment. He must have an environment: he must be affected by it. That is a certainty in the case of any living thing: a certainty so obvious that it would hardly be worth stating were it not that those who talk about the mystic craving for solitudehis complete aloofness from human life-seem often to ignore it. The idea of solitude in any complete sense is, of course, an illusion. We are bound, if we live at all, to accept the fact of a living world outside ourselves, to have social relations with something; and it only remains to decide what these relations shall be. The yogi or the hermit who retreats t6′ the forest in order to concentrate his mind more utterly upon the quest of God, only exchanges the society of human beings for the society of other living things. Did he eliminate all else, the parasites of his own body, the bacterial populations of his alimentary system, would be there to remind him that man cannot live alone. He may shift his position in the web of life, but its strands will enmesh him still. So, too, the monk or nun ” buried alive tJ in the cloister is still living a family life: only it is a family life that is governed by special ideals.

Now it is plainly better for the mystic, whose aim is the establishment of special relations with the spiritual order, that the social consciousness in which he is immersed, and from which he is taking color all the time, should have a spiritual and religious tendency: that the social acts in which he takes part should harmonize rather than conflict with his own deep intuition of reality. The difference in degree between that deep intuition and the outward corporate acts-the cult-which he thus shares, may be enormous: for the cult is an expression of the crowd consciousness, and manifests its spiritual crudity, its innate conservatism, its primitive demands for safety and personal rewards. The inadequacy or unreality of the forms, the low level of the adoration which they evoke, may distress and even disgust him. Yet, even so, it is better for him that he should be within a church than outside it. Compared with this one fact-that he is a member of a social group which recognizes spiritual values, and therefore lives in an environment permeated by religious concepts-the accuracy in detail of the creed which that group professes, the adequacy of its liturgical acts, is unimportant.

Next, the demands made and restrictions imposed by the community on the individual are good for the mystic. Man is social right through: in spirit as well as in body and mind. His most sublime spiritual experiences are themselves social in type. Intercourse of a person with a Person, the merging of his narrow consciousness in a larger consciousness, the achievement of a divine son ship, a spiritual marriage: these are the highest things that he can say concerning his achievement of Divine Reality. And they all entail, not a narrow self-realization, but the breaking-down of barriers; the setting-up of wider relationships. It follows that self-emergence in the common life is an education for that self-emergence in the absolute life at which the mystic aims. Such self-emergence, and the training in humility, self-denial, obedience, suppleness, which is involved in it, is held by all ascetic teachers to be essential to the education of the human soul. Union with, and to-a certain extent submission to, the church, to the family-to life, in fact-an attitude of self-giving surrender; this is the best of preparations for that total self-naughting of the soul which is involved in union with God; that utter doing-away of the I, the Me, and the Mine. till it becomes one will and one love with the divine will and love.

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{Excerpt from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_mysticism}

The tradition of Christian Mysticism is as old as Christianity itself.  At least three texts from the New Testament set up themes that recur throughout the recorded thought of the Christian mystics. The first, Galatians 2:20, says that:

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me, and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. (KJV)

The second important scriptural text for Christian mysticism is 1 John 3:2:

Beloved, now we are the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.

The third such text, especially important for Eastern Christian mysticism, is found in II Peter 1:4:

…[E]xceedingly great and precious promises [are given unto us]; that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust. (emphasis added)

Two major themes of Christian mysticism are (1) a complete identification with, or imitation of Christ, to achieve a unity of the human spirit with the spirit of God; and (2) the perfect vision of God, in which the mystic seeks to experience God “as he is,” and no more “through a glass, darkly.” (1 Corinthians 13:12)

Other mystical experiences are described in other passages. In 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, Paul sets forth an example of a possible out-of-body experience by someone who was taken up to the “third heaven”, and taught unutterable mysteries:

I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. And I knew such a man, (whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.

Perhaps a similar experience occurred at the Transfiguration of Jesus, an incident confirmed in each of the Synoptic Gospels. Here Jesus led three of his apostles, Peter, John, and James, to pray at the top of a mountain, where he became transfigured. Jesus’s face shone like the sun, and he was clad in brilliant white clothes. Elijah and Moses appeared with Jesus, and talked with him, and then a bright cloud appeared overhead, and a voice from the cloud proclaimed, “This is my beloved Son: hear him.”

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Exhibiting it by turns from the point of view of metaphysics,psychology, and symbolism, it is an attempt to gather between the covers of one volume information at present scattered amongst many monographs and text-books written in divers tongues, and to give the student in a compact form at least the elementary facts in regard to each of those subjects which are most closely connected with the study of the mystics.

Those mystics, properly speaking, can only be studied in their works: works which are for the most part left unread by those who now talk much about mysticism. Certainly the general reader has this excuse, that the masterpieces of mystical literature, full of strange beauties though they be, offer considerable difficulties to those who come to them unprepared. In the first seven chapters of this book I have tried to remove a few of these difficulties; to provide the necessary preparation; and to exhibit the relation in which mysticism stands to other forms of life.

If, then, the readers of this section are enabled by it to come to the encounter of mystical literature with a greater power of sympathetic comprehension than they previously possessed, it will have served the purpose for which it has been composed.

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