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Mystics in Spite of Themselves

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Prologue....................................vii1. Introduction.............................12. St. Augustine............................233. Gregory the Great........................394. Anselm of Canterbury.....................655. Ramon Llull..............................87Epilogue....................................101Postscript..................................113Index of Names..............................117Index of Subjects...........................122

Chapter One

At first viewing, mysticism appears as something rather vague and amorphous, an umbrella for all types of exotica and erotica. Though personal, cultural, and universal factors are interwoven into these spiritual experiences, the privileged habitat of mysticism remains with the individual, the hermit roasting under the Egyptian sun as contrasted with the army of frenzied monks that devastated cities and were capable of such pernicious acts as butchering the philosopher Hypatia. The indeterminate boundaries of the mystical event, its proximity to the odd and bizarre, the subterranean and unknown, give it a tarnished reputation. The majority of philosophers, from Xenophanes to Bertrand Russell, regarded mysticism — or what they thought to be mysticism — with frank distaste. Mystical writers responded in kind, savaging the philosophers and their wild pretensions.

Nevertheless, some of the greatest philosophers in the ancient world were not loath to enter a realm that strikes us as remarkably similar to that of the mystic. Plato, through the mouth of Socrates in the Phaedrus, discusses the different forms of theia mania, the God-given state of being beside oneself. The "highest goods" come to humans in the manner of mania, seen as a sort of divine gift. Christians who encounter the Sybil in the Dies Irae linked with King David testifying to the End Times would have been astonished to find her lumped together with the prophetess at Delphi and the priestess of Dodoma as examples of transport prophetique, public ecstasy. According to myth, Apollo breathed into the Sybil "the riches of spirit," a state of inspiration in which self-possession is suspended, a theia mania that can appear as madness.

Platonism entered Christianity under many guises — exercising a strong influence on spirituality, as witnessed in the works of the church fathers, Augustine being a prime example. The Greek term for the vision of God was theoria (contemplation), the most elevated human activity. During the third century — prior to the advent of monasticism — the Christian thinkers of Alexandria (Clement and Origen) applied Platonic language to the journey of the soul of God. Some Christians, then and later, reacted unfavorably to what appeared to be a foreign intrusion. Several centuries later, the Orthodox saint Gregory Palamas was hardly an exception when he remarked that the writings of Greek philosophers are like "poisoned snakes from whom doctors succeed in deriving useful drugs."

If Platonism became a problem for Christianity, Christianity was no less a problem for Paganism. The first mention of Christianity was made by Pliny, the Roman governor of Bithynia (Turkey), at the beginning of the second century. Christianity, in his opinion, was a "superstition." Later in the century, Celsus wrote that Jesus himself was a magician and sorcerer and that Christians practiced magic and consorted with demons. The Pagans in general saw the Christian community as peculiar and anti-social, a small religious sect that drew its adherents from the lower depths of society. Indeed, the number of Christians in the early second century was minimal — probably less than fifty thousand — in a society of approximately sixty million.

Criticism of the new sect burgeoned. For Tacitus, Christianity was the enemy of mankind, an affront to the religious and social world. Porphyry, the editor of Plotinus's Enneads and his biographer, defended Pagan practices and beliefs, attempting to prove that Christianity had jettisoned the worship of the universal God in favor of the worship of Christ. Emperor Julian (The Apostate) used the law to curb Christian influence. In A.D. 363, the Christians were forbidden to teach Greek literature because he believed that Paideia was a gift from the gods which Christians had abused, thus blaspheming the gods. This composed the gist of his work Against the Galileans, a work now lost and known to us only through St. Cyril's Contra Julianum. Julian had been initiated into the cults of Cybele and Mithra, and followed the line initiated by Celsus that Christianity is an apostasy from Judaism that, without scriptural warrant, has installed a "new law" and deserted the "Jewish Law" for "a new and strange rite dreamed of by Jesus' followers with no claim to antiquity."

In spite of violent invective, persecution, and the dogged persistence of Paganism after the reign of Constantine, Christianity grew and prospered. It harbored the notion of contemplation as a somewhat suspect "secret sharer" and suffered a transformation in the work of Augustine, who grudgingly accepted the Neoplatonic concept of contemplation most completely. Augustine gave a different name to the terminology he accepted: "The Incarnation, taken in all seriousness, could suffice to turn such Platonism, like a glove, inside out."

A short time later, Cassian taught that contemplation arises from meditation on Scripture. It is through constant meditation, supplemented by ascetic practices, that the heights of contemplation can be attained. Later, the Greek notion of contemplation waned, due perhaps to the progressive eclipse of the Greek language in the West. Marcus Aurelius (121-180), so emphatically Roman, wrote his thoughts in Greek. Over two hundred years later, the use of Greek diminished to such a point that the Emperor Julian (332-363) sponsored a revival of Hellenism, which died in the West after the emperor's death. In the East, however, Justinian was the last emperor that spoke Latin, either in public or in private. The last Greek pope was Zacharias (741-52), who translated Gregory's Dialogues into Greek. His successor, Stephen II, was the first of the line of purely Latin popes.

St. Jerome was one of those rare Romans of the period who could understand spoken Greek. He had followed the lectures of Didymus the Blind at Alexandria. In the fifth and sixth centuries, when few Christian writers in the West understood Greek, such translators as Jerome and Rufinus, and later Dionysus Exiguus and the group of translators at Vivarium, took on the burden of cultural exchange. The ascetic ideal, which was more authentically Christian than the transports of the Hellenic sages, found its highest expression in monasticism. Augustine, although impressed by the Life of Antony, did not flee to the desert, although in his community at Hippo Regius the discipline was monastic in spirit.

When Constantine entered Rome in A.D. 312, he found that the Christian church in the West had only just emerged from severe persecution. The first general prohibition of Pagan worship came in 391-92, but it would be centuries before it began to penetrate the vast mass of the population. Between 429 and...