Define 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.catholic perspective mysticism 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.what is mysticism
True mystics, often mislabeled as “religious individualists can be viewed as taking personal religion to its optimal power. If we believe his account is true, it means he has had an interaction with the spiritual side of things and and is aware of it. which transcends the normal experience, and appears to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he belongs. A mystic talks to God as one human being to another, and not as a spokesman for his tribe. He survives by an immediate knowledge far greater than by belief; by a knowledge possessed in the hours of direct, uninterrupted intercourse with the Transcendent, which he calls ‘an 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.
It seems at first that such a personality as his lacks the support generally given by a community of fellow-believers. 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. It seems that a lot of the distrust of him comes from the feeling of independence from the group that he experiences - 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 told you what I saw,” David told them; and the people who didn’t see could only keep quiet.
Yet this common opinion 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 left the church that raised them have now found that they seem to draw devout followers to them and have become leaders of their own groups now. 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?
