Christian Mysticism
A common criticism raised against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type, of religion, they follow personal and individual spiritual enthusiasms, and that they shun the corporate life and institutions of the church or community they are part ofdefinition of mysticism And 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.
mystics of timeTrue mystics, often mislabeled as “religious individualists can be viewed as taking personal religion to its optimal power. If we are able to believe his experience is real then we have to believe that it involves intimate involvement with the spiritual reality, and acceptance of it. This transcends the normal experience, and seems to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he or she 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 certainty he acquires – a certainty which he cannot pass on to others – affects the totality of his responses to the Universe. Even in his darkest times when he loses his entire sense of spiritual reality, it still continues to support him.
This personality seems to stand without the need of support, while the smaller nature,having more of a religious consciousness, recieves from the corporate spirit. But even so, the term ‘mystic’ alone indicates a certain aloofness from the majority, suggesting that he holds a secret that the community together does not and cannot share and that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise.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 suppose he is often distrusted because of this sense of his freedom of the herd, his possible separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the additional fact that his own methods and results cannot be bashed or verified by those who have not shared them. ?I have spoken what I have seen?, said David – but those who did not see what he saw 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. If we can examine the nature of the connection between these two factors: to ask, on the one hand, what it is that the corporate life and the group consciousness which it develops give the mystic; on the other, what is the real value of the mystic to the corporate life of his church?
