The New Evangelization requires a rediscovery of Christian mysticism, and a revival of the monastic setting which is its natural home
“Put out into deep water, and lower your nets for a catch.” — Luke 5:4
“If God exists, He must be felt. If He is Love, it must be experienced and become the fact of one's inmost life. Without spiritual enlightenment, all is an idle talk, like a bubble which vanishes under the least pressure. Without the awakening of the religious sense or faculty, God is a shadow, the soul a ghost, and life a dream.” —Soyen Shaku, Zen For Americans
The first two topics of this article are not often associated with the third. Many people think of Christian mysticism and monasticism as strictly “in-house” matters, too remote and esoteric to have any bearing on the Church’s re-evangelization of the post-Christian West.
While Catholics generally respect the contemplative vocation, they may see it as peripheral to supposedly more urgent concerns, such as improving catechesis and the liturgy, or bearing witness to faith and morality in public life.
Those concerns are critical. But we believe the New Evangelization of historically Christian countries also requires a rediscovery of Christian mysticism, and a revival of the monastic setting which is its natural home.
The Church has a new task in our time: to re-evangelize regions that are falling away from the faith. Most inhabitants of this post-Christendom are not atheists: many of them are open to “spirituality,” though skeptical toward “religion.”
This public hunger for spirituality reflects a legitimate need. Christians must rediscover the mystical core of the Gospel, and present it to the world through the witness of monasticism.
We have written this article to outline the urgency of both tasks, and their inseparability from one another. To re-evangelize the West, the Church must recover its mystical heritage – but this task requires contact with the living monastic tradition. Monasteries are thus essential to the New Evangelization.
Sympathizing with the “Spiritually Independent”
Though their cultural prominence is new, and their identifying label of recent vintage, the “spiritual but not religious” are no new phenomenon. Great heresies, and even some major world religions, have sprung from the minds of those who sought mystical experience without structure and authority.
Ultimately, we need both mysticism and structure. The spiritual life is not just about connecting with God, but also involves public worship and communion with others. With no doctrinal and dogmatic center, it is hard to tell true experiences of God from delusions – and hard, too, to discern God’s will among the morass of human opinions. For these reasons, and many more, “spirituality” needs “religion.”
Critiques of spiritual individualism will not solve the problem, however. Moved by charity, the Church must respond to whatever is legitimate in the desires of the “spiritual but not religious.” In a misguided way, many of them are seeking something essential: a transcendent, transformative experience of God.
The Christian faith, in its diverse Eastern and Western forms, is the definitive answer to man’s search for transcendence and meaning. Yet the swelling ranks of the “spiritually independent” – many of them originally baptized into the Church – indicate a vast public ignorance of Christian mysticism.
Worse still, many Christians share this ignorance. They neglect their own mystical tradition, often due to misconceptions about what it actually is. Unschooled in their own rich spiritual heritage, they cannot evangelize those for whom “spirituality” and “religion” are at odds.
This ignorance of mysticism must cease, especially if we care about the New Evangelization of historically Christian nations, which are now the breeding-ground for “spirituality without religion.”
Monasticism has always been a privileged vehicle for the transmission and spread of mystical spirituality, especially among Eastern Christians. Our tradition exists to foster the same intimacy with God that the first hermits sought in the Egyptian deserts. The same is true of traditional Western monasticism, especially in the Benedictine lineage which drew so much from the Desert Fathers.
We hope that the Western Church will rediscover its own great monastic tradition, and the practical mysticism at its core. Nothing else will suffice for the evangelization of those who seek “spirituality” but mistrust “religion.” Indeed, nothing else will satisfy the needs of the human soul.
What is Christian Mysticism?
Mysticism is often misunderstood, and thus treated as off-limits to the average person. So before speaking of what it is, we must make a clarification. The term “mysticism” does not refer to the extraordinary gifts sometimes found in the lives of saints: visions, private revelations, supernatural abilities, and the like.
These things are not essential to the mystical life, and the saints themselves tell us to not seek them out. We cannot understand the mystical dimension of faith, if we imagine it filled with apparitions, ecstasies, and unusual charismatic gifts. The essence of Christian mysticism is more profound, and more subtle.
Mysticism means relating to God on the deepest level of our being. It means knowing and loving him in a transcendent way, in keeping with his infinite and unfathomable nature. This profound communion with the Triune God is the reason for our existence, the true meaning of our lives.
Christian mysticism is rooted in the soul’s encounter with the Risen Christ, and our reception of the divine life that is his gift. The grace that Christ gives is not merely a created substance, but the indwelling personal presence of the Holy Spirit. The “Spirit of Sonship” conforms us to the image of Christ (Rom. 8:29) – allowing us to share, by grace, in Jesus’ own relationship of oneness with God the Father.
Mysticism thus revolves around a central paradox – a central mystery. That paradox is the closeness of the transcendent God, which makes it possible for us, finite creatures though we are, to be united to him.
We humble ourselves before God’s infinitude; but in this very act of worship, we find he is, as St. Augustine said, “closer to us than we are to ourselves.” We cannot reach God by our own power, yet by his grace, we are re-united with him as the very ground of our own being.
The mystical relationship with the Trinity goes beyond human thoughts and words, although thoughts and words can help us enter into it. Mysticism is also deeper than emotions and desires – though they, too, can help us reach the depths of spiritual life. The mystical life is neither mindless nor emotionless, but it puts the intellect and the emotions at the service of something greater.
The word “mysticism” is related to the idea of “mystery.” From a mystical perspective, the paradoxes of faith are not intellectual puzzles to solve, but sacred realities to approach with awe. God reveals himself, yet remains infinitely mysterious – always more unknown than known.
There are different schools of Christian mysticism, with different vocabularies and methods. But they are all responses to the same truth: the absolutely transcendent God has drawn near to us in Jesus Christ. The wholly Other has become one of us, sharing in our death and rising again to give us his everlasting Life. The Lord Jesus wants to give us his Spirit, and make us sons of his Father.
These are revealed truths, the factual basis of our faith. But they are also mysteries that we can never fully comprehend. To be a mystic is to found one’s life on the truth of the Incarnation, while striving to enter ever more deeply into the mystery of Christ and the life of the Trinity.
Christian mysticism is not for a select few. Christ tells us that this union with God is for all: “Anyone who loves me will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him and make a home in him” (John 14:23, NJB).
The Dangers of Discarding Christian Mysticism
Understood in this sense, mysticism is not optional. If we strip the Gospel of mystery and mysticism, we cut out its heart. For the Church is Christ’s Mystical Body, united to the Lord in the Paschal Mystery.
Yet there is a temptation to substitute other things for that direct encounter between the soul and the Lord. We often shy away from that transforming union with God, replacing it with something else: something we can comprehend or control, which takes less discipline and sacrifice.
This temptation is pernicious, because most of our substitutes for mysticism are good and necessary in themselves: doctrine and theology; moral virtue and good works; sacred music and art; social action and reform. All of these things can support a transcendent relationship with God – but none of them can take its place. They cannot substitute for our spiritual union with God in Christ.
When lesser goods occupy the place of the mystical life, we become spiritually blind. Doctrinal orthodoxy, moral uprightness, and the externals of Church life become substitutes for God’s very presence. Surrounded by the paraphernalia of holiness, we believe we are close to God, when in fact our hearts and souls are far from him.
The Church exists to unite us with God, as partakers of the Divine Life, and every other aspect of our religion serves this ultimate purpose. We must never forget this, in our practice and proclamation of the faith.
The neglect of Christian mysticism has severe consequences. If they are given doctrine and morality with no clear path to union with God, Christians are tempted to seek the very inverse: spirituality without objective truth, mysticism with no moral or intellectual guide rails.
If the Church does not offer instruction in the spiritual life, believers will not give up their desire for it. Often they will seek it in a non-Christian setting, looking to New Age teachers or Far Eastern religions.
The modern “spiritual marketplace” is a challenge for all Christians: Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. But it is a particular challenge for Western Christians, whose mystical and contemplative traditions have (since at least the 16th century) been less prominent, and less accessible to the lay faithful, than those schools of mysticism native to the Christian East.
By encountering our Eastern tradition, Western Christians can reconnect with their own mystical and monastic roots – as they must, in order to evangelize the spiritual seekers in their midst.
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