Mystics of the Christian Tradition

Steven Fanning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134590971
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

From divine visions to self-tortures, some strange mystical experiences have shaped the Christian tradition as we know it. Full of colourful detail, Mystics of the Christian Tradition examines the mystical experiences that have determined the history of Christianity over two thousand years, and reveals the often sexual nature of these encounters with the divine.
In this fascinating account, Fanning reveals how God's direct revelation to St Francis of Assisi led to his living with lepers and kissing their sores, and describes the mystical life of Margery Kempe who 'took weeping to new decibel levels'. Through presenting the lives of almost a hundred mystics, this broad survey invites us to consider what it means to be a mystic and to explore how people such as Joan of Arc had their lives determined by divine visions.
Mystics of the Christian Tradition is a comprehensive guide to discovering what mysticism means and who the mystics of the Christian tradition actually were.

CHAPTER I
ORIGINS

MYSTICISM IN THE GRECO–ROMAN WORLD

The Roman world in which Christianity arose was one steeped in mystical religion. The traditional Greco–Roman pantheon of gods had been in decline since the midfourth century BC when the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–23 BC) reduced the significance of the Greek city-states whose public cults were based on the worship of the state gods. Previously religion in Greece had been based on the city-state and had as its purpose the welfare of the entire community. But the Hellenistic world of the eastern Mediterranean that succeeded Alexander’s empire was international and cosmopolitan, in which one’s local or national identity and its associated religion were overwhelmed by the reality of belonging to large, multi-ethnic, multi-cultural states unconnected to the old civic gods. To a great extent, individuals were isolated individuals in a great sea of humanity to the diminution of a consciousness of being members of a close and clearly-defined community. Consequently, religions appealing to individuals of every ethnic or national origin were readily adopted throughout the Hellenistic world, often blending both Greek and non-Greek elements. These tendencies were strengthened by the expansion of the Roman Empire to the East in the second and first centuries BC, tending to render meaningless the previous local or national cultures that were now dominated by a state centered far away to the West.

What these new and altered religions offered was salvation from the sufferings of this world, immortality in the next world and a direct communication with salvific deities. These new and rapidly growing religions featured esoteric teachings known only to their initiates, who took the strictest oaths of secrecy, pledging never to reveal the secrets of the cult to outsiders. Hence these cults are known collectively as the Mystery Religions, with the word “mystery” etymologically related to “mysticism.” Like mysticism, the Greek word mysterion, “mystery,” was derived from myein, “to close,” in this case indicating the closed mouth of the initiates of the cults. The adherents of these mysteries kept their oaths so well that we know almost nothing of their esoteric secrets.

The Mystery Religions arose all over the Eastern world and spread easily throughout the Mediterranean, becoming universal cults. From Greece itself the mysteries of Eleusis developed out of a local agricultural cult celebrating the deliverance of Demeter’s daughter Persephone from the clutches of Pluto, ruler of the underworld. In the Hellenistic period, the religion began admitting non-Athenians and even non-Greeks, including a number of Roman emperors. The vernal renewal of life that resulted from Persephone’s annual liberation was allegorized into a symbol of the triumph over death, that is, an immortality that was available to participants in the mysteries of Eleusis. The cult attached to the Greek god Dionysos, a god of vegetation and especially of wine, was also associated with the annual celebration of the return of spring, but it was too marked by orgiastic elements and wild intoxication to be widely adopted outside of Greece. The essence of the worship of Dionysos was taken over and tamed by the Orphic mysteries, which, on the basis of the rebirth of Dionysos after he was killed by the Titans, also celebrated the possibility of immortality.

The cult of the Great Mother was found under a number of names from Asia Minor to Syria and on to Mesopotamia, and at Rome she was generally called Cybele. Here, too, there was the promise of rebirth and immortality, expressed in the myth of her consort Attis, who was killed, or died after castrating himself, and was restored to life each spring. From Egypt a Hellenized version of the worship of Isis and Osiris emerged, based on the murder and dismemberment of Osiris, the search of his wife Isis for the parts of his body and his resurrection when she found them. Thus resurrection and rebirth again symbolized the promise of immortality to the adherents of the cult. All of these Mystery Religions featured a dying male figure who was mourned by the female goddess, with the male being reborn or resurrected as a symbol of new life and immortality. Very different was the religion devoted to the Persian figure Mithras, or Mithra, which was a form of sun worship. In myth, Mithras, a deity of deliverance, slew a bull from whose body and blood grew plants, herbs and crops, again linking death with life, rebirth and immortality.

These Mystery Religions all had the same purpose, the salvation of the individual in a blessed and happy immortality and, with the exception of Mithras, they shared core elements of mythological symbolism. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods they were also remarkably syncretic as elements from one cult were adopted by various other cults, making them increasingly similar over time. All of them, including Mithras, existed on two levels. One was a public side for the purpose of proselytization and evangelization by which the essentials of the cult were explained and potential initiates were recruited. At the same time there was the private aspect of the cult, wherein its inner, hidden and secret face was revealed only after the aspirants underwent elaborate ritualistic initiation ceremonies. One of the most important functions of the initiation was to bring the initiate into direct contact and communion with the deity.

Unfortunately the initiation rites of the Mystery Religions are obscure to us but it is clear that the mystical contact with the deity concerned was achieved through various means. The preparatory stages of fasting, vigils and meditation might be combined with initiation rites, usually held in darkness with dancing and music to produce a state of ecstasy whereby the initiates “leave their own identity, become at home with the gods, and experience divine possession.”¹ At the same time, the believers might encounter their deity in the forms of dreams or visions, as when Isis came to Lucius in The Golden Ass (or Metamorphoses) of Apuleius, reassuring him, “I am here to take pity on your ills; I am here to give aid and solace. Cease then from tears and wailings, set aside your sadness; there is now dawning for you, through my providence, the day of salvation.”² The rites were also intended to bring about the assimilation of the believer with the deity through a number of means. The ceremonies might lead to the initiate’s being transformed into a divine being either through the bestowal of immortality or by a divine indwelling within the believer. At the climax of the initiation in The Golden Ass, Lucius reported,

At the dead of night I saw the sun flashing with bright effulgence. I approached close to the gods above and the gods below and worshipped them face to face. Behold, I have related things about which you must remain in ignorance.³

Some of the cults featured a mystical marriage with the deity to indicate the most intimate union possible for humans, while virtually all of them offered some sort of sacramental meal of food and drink wherein one was thought actually to consume the deity and thus to be united with it. Through one or many of these means the adherent of the cult could receive the deity’s direct theophany, often expressed in terms of brightness and light and the reception of unutterable revelations. Thus the Mysteries offered, and the population eagerly desired, direct contact with the divine, whether in the form of dreams and visions, the indwelling of the divine, a spiritual marriage with the deity, consuming the divine and making it one with the believer, or rebirth and assimilation with the deity. Put simply, the Mysteries “conduce to Mysticism.”⁴

Very similar to the Mystery Religions was Gnosticism, whose name falsely implies a coherency and unity to what was a number of schools, movements and philosophies that shared only a basic world-view. However, ignoring the myriad of differences among the various strands of thought within the core of Gnosticism, in general Gnostics were dualists, opposing the spiritual and the good to the material and the evil. To the Gnostics, God was purely spiritual and absolutely unknowable and incomprehensible to humans and thus could not have had a direct role in the creation of the material world or of humanity. The world, including human bodies, was created by intermediary powers who placed divine light (or “the divine spark,” that is, the human spirit) inside the material human body, making humans both material and divine. However, the human condition was one of absolute ignorance of the truth of the human condition and of anything of the world of the divine. As long as humans remained in that condition, they were doomed to a cycle of birth and rebirth into this prison of the corrupt, evil, material world dominated by evil powers and Fate. On their own, humans were unable to escape.

The means of salvation, therefore, must come from outside, by a divine revelation or illumination of truth providing knowledge (gnosis in Greek, from which word Gnosticism is derived), that is, by means of mystical experience. One text describes this illuminatory vision, “in an instant everything was immediately opened to me. I saw an endless vision in which everything became light.”⁵ The one who had been chosen was given knowledge of the entire human condition, of “who we were, what we became, where we were, where we have been thrown, towards what end we haste, from where we are redeemed, what birth is, and what rebirth is.”⁶ This gnosis was also the knowledge of God, which can come only by means of a revelation from the deity, and was thus a means to liberation. This salvation meant the return of the divine spark to God, “the final end for those who have received knowledge: to be made god.”⁷ While the Gnostics had no mythology in common with the Mystery Religions, they did share much of the basic outlook of the Mysteries, especially those of Orpheus, in teaching that a piece of the divine was trapped in the prison of the body with liberation possible only by means of a direct illuminatory revelation from the deity.

The surviving Gnostic literature is generally fragmentary and derived from a number of differing Gnostic traditions, especially from the hostile writings of their Christian and Neoplatonic opponents, making it difficult to discover the origins and early progress of the Gnostic thought. The first traces of Gnosticism appear only in the mid-first century AD and within a century there was a distinctive Gnostic form of Christianity that drew the bitter opposition of such writers as Irenaeus and Tertullian, who treated Gnosticism as an heretical Christian sect. However, there were also Jewish Gnostics as well as Gnostics outside of Christianity and Judaism, whom the Neoplatonist Plotinus attacked. The scanty information available limits our knowledge of who the Gnostics were or how widespread Gnosticism was, but it was strong enough within Christianity to be regarded as the most serious challenge to its unity and doctrine in the second and third centuries. The growth and strength of Gnosticism, with its salvation delivered as a divine gift of vision and illumination, add to the ubiquity of mystical religion in the world into which Christianity emerged.

The Mystery Religions and Gnosticism are examples of mystical religions that had mass appeal over the almost four centuries following Alexander’s creation of the Hellenistic world. Plato (429–347 BC) provided a more philosophical mystical world-view that attracted many of the educated élite of the Greco–Roman cultures of the Mediterranean. His teachings had much in common with some of the Mystery Religions, especially the Orphic cult and Gnosticism, as well as with the religious communities that revered Pythagoras as their founder. While Plato was not officially a Pythagorean, he shared the core of the religious philosophy of Pythagoreanism – the divinity and immortality of the soul, which is imprisoned in the body in a series of transmigrations. Plato wrote no comprehensive treatise on his teachings and vowed never to do so; thus the general tenor of Plato’s beliefs must be pieced together from a number of his works which present his thought in the form of allegories and myths. Plato appears to have posited a deity who created the universe and was so remote from human affairs that the race of humans was, in the mythology found in the Timaeus, put together by intermediary gods created by the deity. The intermediaries combined divine souls provided by the deity and material bodies made up of the basic elements of the universe, thus the soul is divine and immortal while remaining alien to the material body in which it is imprisoned. In the Phaedrus, Plato provided an additional mythology, describing how the original winged souls in the heavenly realms lost their wings due to their wrongdoing and were born into human bodies. The souls were doomed to 10,000 years of successive incarnations before they could return to their original heavenly home and, according to how they lived their lives, they could even be sentenced to incarnations as animals. But in essence the soul was divine and in time would return to its origin.

Ten thousand years are a virtual infinity in which to be trapped in a seemingly endless cycle of incarnations and for Plato, as in the Mystery Religions, the imperative was to find a means to effect an early release from the dreary cycle. In the Phaedo Plato argues that a person can disassociate the soul from the body by allowing none of the senses to distract it, by overcoming the body’s needs and demands and living as though one were dead already, that is, by leading a life of purificatory asceticism that permits the soul to dwell by itself apart from the body. At the physical death, such a soul, no longer incumbered by the heavy, earthly body, can join the “company of the gods.” The greatest obstacle to leading such a “philosophical” life is the ignorance of humans, unaware that all that is seen and known through the senses, that is, what they think they know, is but a feeble, mutable and transitory image of absolute, immutable, divine truths, and thus are completely unreliable. Humans misunderstand what is real and lead lives dedicated to satisfying the sensual, bodily demands, thinking that “nothing exists but what they can grasp with both hands.”⁸

This produces a dilemma – the soul remains weighed down in bodily incarnations because it does not know the truth but it can never find truth in the illusory world in which it is encased in the body. Genuine knowledge of eternal absolute truths can only come by means of revelation from the divine, as Plato describes in the Symposium, and it is through contemplation that humans can prepare themselves for the divine revelation. Plato’s most famous allegory for such revelation is in his story of the cave in the Republic, where a person is able to struggle free of the shackles of darkness and ascend to the dazzling, illuminating light of the sun.

Plato saw this divine illumination as a mystical experience and employed the language of the Mystery Religions, especially the concept of initiation in the mysteries, throughout his dialogues. He described the revelation in terms of divine possession and ecstasy and even provided what is often regarded as a personal account of such an experience, “only after long partnership in common life devoted to this very thing [philosophy] does truth flash upon the soul, like a flame kindled by a leaping spark, and once born there it nourishes itself thereafter.”⁹ For Plato, “salvation” was achieved through mystical revelation which a person could assist by leading a life of asceticism and contemplation.

Perhaps a far more important influence during the founding phase of Christianity were the many strands of mysticism within Judaism. On the one hand, a straightforward literal reading of the Jewish scriptures presents the original state of the ancestors of the human race as one in which they were in direct communication with God until the sin of Adam and Eve caused them to be expelled from the Garden of Eden. Subsequently a life of constant conversation with God was impossible but God continued to appear directly or through intermediaries to humans. God warned Noah directly of the coming flood and instructed him to build the ark (Gen. 6.13–14), the patriarch Abraham constantly received directions by God as well as the divine promise that his descendants, who would be innumerable (Gen. 15. 2–6), would receive the land of Canaan (Gen. 12.7), and Abraham received the three divine visitors at Mamre (Gen. 18.1–5). God gave a direct answer to Rebekah’s prayer (Gen. 25.23), Jacob was addressed by God during his dream of the ladder (Gen. 28.13), renewing his covenant previously made to Abraham. In Egypt Joseph was given the ability to interpret dreams (“Are not interpretations God’s business?”¹⁰).

Of course the arch-mystic of the Hebrew tradition was Moses, to whom God called from the burning bush (Ex. 3.4) and whom God sent on his mission to free the children of Israel from Egyptian bondage after arming him with the ability to perform miracles. On the mountain of Sinai, Moses spoke with God and received directly from God the Law, being allowed to see the back of God (Ex. 33.23–34.6). When he descended from the mountain, Moses was transformed, as his skin shone (Ex. 34.29). Of course, during the forty years of wandering in the Sinai, God was present with the Israelites,...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• PLATES AND TIMELINES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PLATES
• PROLOGUE
• CHAPTER I: ORIGINS
• CHAPTER II: THE EASTERN CHURCH
• CHAPTER III: THE WESTERN CHURCH IN THE MIDDLE AGES
• CHAPTER IV: MYSTICS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
• CHAPTER V: POST-REFORMATION MYSTICS IN ENGLAND AND AMERICA
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY