What is Mysticism?
I’ve been a student of mysticism ever since first reading Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness back in 1979, right after I graduated from high school. Nearly three decades have gone by and I’m no closer than ever to being able to define mysticism.
Sure, I know all the basic definitions: it is the experience of union with God. It’s a form of spirituality grounded in ecstatic and altered states of consciousness. It’s the interior, personal, and even esoteric dimension of religion. It’s a dangerous tendency to adulterate Christianity with alien philosophical or religious ideas, like Neoplatonism or Vedanta. It’s a way of seeing, in which the presence of God is discerned in the Bible or in the sacramental life of the church. It’s another name for deification. And on and on it goes.
I guess it goes without saying that I reject the critical and negative ways of understanding mysticism. (more…)
