Mysticism...

Mysticism in general refers to a direct and immediate experience of the sacred, or the knowledge derived from such an experience. In Christianity this experience usually takes the form of a vision of, or sense of union with, God; however, there are also nontheistic forms of mysticism, as in Buddhism. Mysticism is usually accompanied by meditation, prayer, and ascetic discipline.

It may also be accompanied by unusual experiences of ecstasy, levitation, visions, and power to read human hearts, to heal, and to perform other unusual acts. Mysticism occurs in most, if not all, the religions of the world, although its importance within each varies greatly. The criteria and conditions for mystical experience vary depending on the tradition, but three attributes are found almost universally. First, the experience is immediate and overwhelming, divorced from the common experience of reality. Second, the experience or the knowledge imparted by it is felt to be self - authenticating, without need of further evidence or justification. Finally, it is held to be ineffable, its essence incapable of being expressed or understood outside the experience itself.
Many mystics have written of their experiences, and these writings are the best source for our knowledge of mysticism. Poetic language is frequently the vehicle of expression. Fire, an interior journey, the dark night of the soul, a knowing that is an un - knowing - such are the images or descriptions used for communicating the mystical experience. In the Christian tradition mysticism is understood as the result of God's action in persons, an unmerited grace they receive from union with God. Other religions allow for the human achievement of the mystical states through certain methods of contemplation, fasting, and breathing. Only those whose lives are marked by penance and emotional purification achieve mystical states, however, and the experience itself is always of an Absolute that transcends the human efforts or methods of achieving it.

Modern philosophers and psychologists have studied the occurrence of mysticism. William James suggested that it may be an extension of the ordinary fields of human consciousness. The philosopher Henri Bergson considered intuition to be the highest state of human knowing and mysticism the perfection of intuition. Today scientists are interested in the ways in which certain drugs seem to induce quasi - mystical states. Recent studies have added to the understanding of mysticism without fully explaining it in psychological terms.

Among the many Christian mystics who have documented their experiences are Saint Francis of Assisi; Saint Teresa of Avila; Saint John of the Cross; Jacob Bohme; George Fox, founder of the Quakers; and Emanuel Swedenborg. For information on mysticism in Islam, see Sufism; in Judaism, Hasidism and Kabbalah; in the Eastern religions, Taoism, Upanishads, Vedanta, and Zen Buddhism.

Joan A Range

Bibliography
H Bridges, American Mysticism: From William James to Zen (1970); E C Butler, Western Mysticism (1967); W H Capp and W M Wright, eds., Silent Fire: An Invitation to Western Mysticism (1978); J M Clark, The Great German Mystics (1949); W James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902); D Knowles, The English Mystical Tradition (1961); J Marquette, Introduction to Comparative Mysticism (1949); E O'Brien, Varieties of Mystical Experience (1964); G Parrinder, Mysticism in the World's Religions (1977); G G Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1959); E Stevens, An Introduction to Oriental Mysticism (1974); D T Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (1957); R C Zaehner, Mysticism (1961).



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mysticism
Advanced Information
As recognized by all writers on this subject, whether they claim direct personal mystical experience or not, both the definition and description of the mystical encounter are difficult. It is clear, however, that mysticism is not the same as magic, clairvoyance, parapsychology, or occultism, nor does it consist in a preoccupation with sensory images, visions, or special revelations. Nearly all Christian mystical writers relegate these phenomena to the periphery. Nearly all Christian mystics avoid the occult arts entirely. Briefly and generally stated, mystical theology or Christian mysticism seeks to describe an experienced, direct, nonabstract, unmediated, loving knowing of God, a knowing or seeing so direct as to be called union with God.


History
A brief historical survey of Christian mysticism is essential to an understanding of the varied ways in which it is explained and defined. Although the terms "mystery" and "mystical" are related etymologically to ancient mystery cults, it is doubtful that NT and patristic writers were dependent theologically upon these sources. A distinct mystical or mystery theology emerged in the Alexandrian school of exegesis and spirituality with Clement of Alexandria and Origen and their search for the hidden meaning of Scripture and their exposition of the mystery of redemption.
The Cappadocian fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa; leading monastics, especially Evagrius of Pontus (346 - 99) and John Cassian (c. 360 - 435); Augustine of Hippo; and the obscure personage known as Dionysius the Pseudo - Areopagite created the formative legacy for medieval mysticism. The term generally used until the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to describe the mystical experience was "contemplation." In its original philosophical meaning this word (Gr. theoria) described absorption in the loving viewing of an object or truth.

Only in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the writings of Richard of Saint Victor and Thomas Aquinas, do systematic descriptive analyses of the contemplative life appear. Late medieval concern with practical and methodical prayer contributed to a turning point in the sixteenth century Ignatian and Carmelite schools (Ignatius Loyola, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross). Spiritual writers from these traditions were concerned primarily with empirical, psychological, and systematic descriptions of the soul's behavior in order to assist spiritual directors.

Protestants generally rejected mystical theology. Despite his acquaintance with medieval mystical writings, Martin Luther cannot be called a mystic, recent attempts to arrange his theology around a mystical center notwithstanding. Some Protestants in most periods retained an interest in the mystical tradition, although they should not necessarily be considered mystics. But mainstream Protestantism has generally mistrusted or been openly hostile toward a mystical dimension of the spiritual life.

In Catholic circles mystical theology was virtually submerged under a tide of enlightenment rationalism in the eighteenth century. A mystical reaction to rationalism and naturalism, aided by the development of psychological science in the later nineteenth century, is still bearing fruit in the late twentieth century. A controversy over the relation of mystical theology to "ordinary" prayer and the Christian striving for holiness or perfection dominated the early decades of the twentieth century.

In general, whereas many Catholic theologians reacted to the challenge of rationalism, naturalism, and modernism with renewed attention to mystical and liturgical spiritual theology, many Protestant evagelicals have responded with a generally rational theology of the letter of Scripture. Others have given renewed attention to spirituality in the 1970s but still prefer a "Reformation faith piety" or "prophetic spirituality" to mystical contemplation, partly because of the rejection of mystery in liturgical and sacramental theology and practice. But contemporary evangelical antipathy toward mysticism is also partly the result of Barthian influence that reduces mysticism (and pietism) to a heretical subjectivity and anthropocentrism that denies the utterly transcendent reality of God.


The Nature of Mysticism
Beyond a general descriptive definition as offered above, explanations of the nature and characteristics of the mystical experience vary widely. Throughout Christian history and especially since the sixteenth century many Roman Catholic authors have distinguished ordinary or "acquired" prayer, even if occurring at a supraconceptual level of love, adoration, and desire for God, from the extraordinary or "infused" contemplation which is entirely the work of God's special grace. Only the latter is mystical in a strict sense, according to this view. Other writers, both Catholic and Protestant, would apply the term "mystical" to all communion with God. In the twentieth century some Catholic theologians (e.g., L Bouyer, A Stolz), in conjunction with the movement for liturgical renewal, have sought to locate mystical theology in a scriptural and liturgical context, emphasizing the believer's participation in the mystery of God's reconciliation with his creatures in Christ, especially in the sacraments.
Many attempts have been made to describe the fundamental characteristics of mystical experience. Traditionally it has been asserted that the experiential union of creature and Creator is inexpressible and ineffable, although those who have experienced it seek imagery and metaphors to describe it, however imperfectly. As noted above, it is experienced union or vision, not abstract knowledge. It is beyond the level of concepts, for reasoning, ideas, and sensory images have been transcended (but not rejected) in an intuitive union.

Thus it is suprarational and supraintellectual, not antirational or anti - intellectual. In one sense the sould is passive, because it experiences God's grace poured into itself. Yet the union is not quietistic, because the soul consents to and embraces the spiritual marriage. Although some authors also stress the transient and fleeting nature of mystical union, others describe it as lasting for a definite, even prolonged period of time. More recent theological and liturgical understandings of mystical theology, unlike the systematic phenomenological and "empirical" manuals of the early twentieth century, define characteristics less precisely and seek to fit mystical theology more centrally into an ecclesial and soteriological framework.

The various stages of the mystical way have also been described in immensely varying manner. Virtually all writers agree, however, that purification (purgation or cleaning) and discipline are prerequisites. Each of the three classic stages, the path of purification, the phase of illumination, and the mystical union itself (not necessarily occurring in a fixed sequence but rather in interaction with each other), may be described as consisting of various degrees or graduations. It should not be forgotten that the monastic life, the standard path of ascetic purification throughout much of Christian history, has served as the foundation for much Christian mysticism. Unfortunately, this foundation has been overlooked by some modern scholars who consider mystics to be individualistic seekers after noninstitutional, extrasacramental religious ecstasy.

Teachings about the mystical union have often brought charges of pantheism upon their exponents. Although most mystics seek to transcend the limits of the (false) self, they have been careful to insist on the preservation of the soul's identity in the union with God, choosing such imagery as that of iron glowing in the fire of unitive love, taking on fire in union with the fire, yet without loss of its properties as iron. Indeed, one should rather stress that, far from losing itself, the sould finds its true identity in the mystical union. Many Protestants have found palatable only those mystical writers who are thought to have limited mystical union to a "conformity of human and divine wills," rather than those who teach an ontological union, a union of essence or being. This distinction is problematical, since the meaning of either "ontological union" or "conformity of will" depends on the presuppositions about human nature held by the author in question.

Those who stress a "prophetic faith piety" or "Reformation" alternative to supposed pantheistic or panentheistic mysticism (e.g., Heiler, Bloesch, in part under the influence of Brunner and Barth) have circumscribed mysticism so narrowly and connected it so closely to Neoplatonism that few mystics would recognize it. They have also broadened the meaning of "prophetic religion" so much that most mystics would feel at home under its canopy.

Scriptural sources for Christian mysticism are found largely in the Logos - incarnation doctrine of John's Gospel, in imagery such as that of the vine and branches (John 15) or Christ's prayer for union (John 17), as well as in aspects of the Pauline corpus. The latter include the description of Paul's rapture into the third heaven (II Cor. 12:1 - 4) or statements such as that referring to a life "hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). In all of these the essential theological presuppositions involve belief in a personal God and in the centrality of the incarnation. For medieval mystics Moses' "vision" of God (Exod. 33:12 - 34:9) and his reflection of God's glory upon leaving Mount Sinai (Exod. 34:29 - 35; cf. II Cor. 3:7) served as proof texts, and the allegorized spiritual marriage of the Song of Solomon, together with the other OT wisdom literature, provided unlimited scriptural resources until the shift from spiritual to literal - grammatical humanist and Reformation hermeneutics took place.

Anthropologically, Christian mystical theology presupposes a human capacity or fittedness for God, drawing especially upon the doctrine of human beings created in the image of God and on the doctrine of God become human in Christ. Christian mystics have traditionally understood mystical union as a restoration of the image and likeness of God that was distorted or lost at the fall from innocence. The image of God, distorted but not destroyed, remains as the foundation for the journey from the land of unlikeness to restored likeness and union. Especially in the fourteenth century German Dominican school (Eckhart, Tauler) his teaching on the image of God in humans was expressed with terms such as the "basic will" or "ground" (Grund) of the soul or the "spark of divinity" in the human soul.

In any case, although it stresses union with God who transcends all human limitations, mystical theology is incompatible with either an exclusively transcendent or an exclusively immanent doctrine of God, the God who transcends also became incarnate in Christ and he is immanent in his creatures created in his image. For this reason many representatives of both the social gospel and neo - orthodox theology have been stridently antimystical.


Conclusion
Christian mysticism has often been portrayed as having modified and imported into Christianity the Platonic (Neoplatonic) doctrine of cosmological emanation in creation from the idea of the One and, in mystical union, a corresponding return to the One. While a concern to relate the Creator to creation both immanently and transcendentally has from the earliest centuries led Christian mystics to make use of Neoplatonic philosophy, equally prominent are those (especially in the Franciscan school) whose theology is Christocentric, ecclesial, and liturgical. One of the most cosmologically sophisticated medieval mystics, Nicolas of Cusa (1401 - 64), drew deeply from Neoplatonic and Eckhartian emanationism but was also profoundly Christocentric. The issue cannot be resolved solely with broad brushstrokes of metahistorical categories such as Neoplatonism.
Of the other issues that have recurred in mystical writings and studies of mystical writings, one of the most enduring is the question of the relation between cognitive, intellectual, or speculative elements, on the one hand, and affective, loving, or supraconceptual and suprarational elements on the other. The negative way that "ascends" by stripping off all cognitions and images until one "sees" God in a "cloud of unknowing" darkness differs from the philosophical systems that claim mystical knowledge to be the human reason (including will, intellect, and feeling) exploring the sphere above that of limited rationalism (Inge), as well as the simple clinging to God in love alone posited by some mystics. Such distinctions, however, are not absolute, and most mystics stress the interrelatedness of love and cognition.

The problem of the objective quality of mystical experience that so preoccupied the psychological - empirical writers of the early twentieth century has become less significant for Christians dealing with mysticism theologically in its scriptural, ecclesial, and liturgical contexts. At the same time, for students of the philosophy of religion the question of objective content has gained renewed attention as nineteenth century naturalism wanes and Western interest in Eastern mysticism and religions grows.

D D Martin
(Elwell Evangelical Dictionary)