What is mysticism?

[nolabeliever]

Can someone please explain this term to me?

 

[BillyB]

I’m tempted to ask you what prompted the question. In vase you just wanted a general discussion, take a look at this from the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia (a great resource): newadvent.org/cathen/10663b.htm

Here’s short excerpt

[The Church] teaches that, what man cannot know by natural reason, he can know through revelation and faith; that what he cannot attain to by his natural power he can reach by the grace of God. God has gratuitously elevated human nature to a supernatural state. He has assigned as its ultimate end the direct vision of Himself, the Beatific Vision. But this end can be reached only in the next life; in the present life we can but prepare ourselves for it with the aid of revelation and grace. To some souls, however, even in the present life, God gives a very special grace by which they are enabled to feel His sensible presence; this is true mystical contemplation. In this act, there is no annihilation or absorption of the creature into God, but God becomes intimately present to the created mind and this, enlightened by special illuminations, contemplates with ineffable joy the Divine essence.

 

[detoutcoeur]

Can someone please explain this term to me?

From Evelyn Underhill’s, A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

“Mysticism, in its pure form, is the science of ultimates, the science of union with the Absolute, and nothing else, and that the mystic is the person who attains to this union, not the person who talks about it. Not to know about, but to Be, is the mark of the real initiate.”
ccel.org/ccel/underhill/mysticism.iii.iv.html

You can read this classic work about mysticism online here:

ccel.org/ccel/underhill/mysticism.i.html

 

[thistle]

Father John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary:

MYSTICISM. The supernatural state of soul in which God is known in a way that no human effort or exertion could ever succeed in producing. There is an immediate, personal experience of God that is truly extraordinary, not only in intensity and degree, but in kind. It is always the result of a special, totally unmerited grace of God. Christian mysticism differs essentially from the non-Christian mysticism of the Oriental world. It always recognizes that the reality to which it penetrates simply transcends the soul and the cosmos; there is no confusion between I and thou, but always a profound humility before the infinite Majesty of God. And in Christian mysticism all union between the soul and God is a moral union of love, in doing his will even at great sacrifice to self; there is no hint of losing one’s being in God or absorption of one’s personality into the divine.

 

[nolabeliever]

Thanks for the replies, very interesting…

 

[Vouthon]

Mysticism is quite simply the preparation for, the attainment of and the fruit of a transformative consciousness of the Presence of God experienced intuitively, directly and without any intermediary by an individual person.

There is broad agreement across the religious spectrum that the mystical experience is inexpressible and beyond sense-perceptions. In other words “it is formless, shapeless, colorless, odorless, soundless” as WT Stace once put it. This experience will lead to the awareness of an inexpressible “One [God] to which neither the senses nor the reason can penetrate. In other words, it entirely transcends our sensory-intellectual consciousness” (WT Stace).

St. Catherine of Genoa spoke as follows regarding one of her deepest mystical encounters with God:

“…I am so plunged and submerged in the source of his infinite love, as if I were quite under water in the sea and could not touch, see, feel anything on any side except water…I see without eyes, and I hear without ears. I feel without feeling and taste without tasting. I know neither form nor measure; for without seeing I yet behold an operation so divine that the words I first used, perfection, purity, and the like, seem to me now mere lies in the presence of truth. . . . Nor can I any longer say, “My God, my all.” Everything is mine, for all that is God’s seem to be wholly mine. I am mute and lost in God…God so transforms the soul in Him that it knows nothing other than God; and He continues to draw it up into His fiery love until He restores it to that pure state from which it first issued…”

- Saint Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), Italian Catholic mystic (Life, 50)

The person experiences a deep communion of love with the transcendent and immanent Holy Trinity, in which they participate through grace in the very life of the Godhead.

Mysticism must be distinguished from any occult practices or mystery religions. It has nothing directly to do with visions, clairvoyance, hearing voices, bilocation, extrasensory powers or whatever else. Some mystics do experience such things by the special grace of God however these are secondary phenomena if they occur at all and are not “per se” part of the mystical state.

Non-mystics can have visions and consort with angels without these supernatural experiences making them in any way mystics.

 

[Vouthon]

The word “mystical” is synonymous in its traditional Catholic application with “contemplation” (contemplatio in Latin) which describes the highest stages of prayer in Catholic spirituality which through the grace of God move beyond discursive thought (meditation) and through an ecstatic intuition devoid of images, forms or conceptual knowledge grasp truths concerning God, without any intermediaries between the soul and the Supreme Deity. Such wisdom gives someone insight into realities that would have taken them years to assimilate through study. The contemplative (or “mystic”) has a direct, interior and unmediated conscious awareness of the Supreme Reality of The Most Blessed Trinity beyond themselves which strains their limited powers of human perception to describe for others. In this stage of prayer there is a paradoxical form of knowing which is a kind of infused wisdom purely given by God rather than arrived at through human education.

One of the earliest theologians to use the term mystical was an anonymous sixth-century Syrian monk who called himself “Dionysius” in his corpus of writings that were to become foundational for Catholic and Orthodox Christianity.

One of his works was called “The Mystical Theology”. The word “mystical” was used prior to him to describe contemplative prayer however he elevated it to even greater heights through his use of philosophy.

In the introduction to this work he writes this, which is an accurate description of what the “Catholic Church” understands by “mysticism” (or at least in its apophatic dimension):

Supernal Triad, Deity above all essence, knowledge and goodness; Guide of Christians to Divine Wisdom; direct our path to the ultimate summit of your mystical knowledge, most incomprehensible, most luminous and most exalted, where the pure, absolute and immutable mysteries of theology are veiled in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their Darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories surpassing all beauty.

Let this be my prayer; but do, dear Timothy, in the diligent exercise of mystical contemplation, leave behind the senses and the operations of the intellect, and all things sensible and intellectual, and all things in the world of being and nonbeing, that you may arise by unknowing towards the union, as far as is attainable, with it that transcends all being and all knowledge. For by the unceasing and absolute renunciation of yourself and of all things you may be borne on high, through pure and entire self-abnegation, into the superessential Radiance of the Divine Darkness. But these things are not to be disclosed to the uninitiated, by whom I mean those attached to the objects of human thought, and who believe there is no superessential Reality beyond, and who imagine that by their own understanding they know it that has made Darkness Its secret place…

Its incomprehensible Presence is manifested upon those heights of Its Holy Places; that then It breaks forth, even from that which is seen and that which sees, and plunges the mystic into the Darkness of Unknowing, whence all perfection of understanding is excluded, and he is enwrapped in that which is altogether intangible, wholly absorbed in it that is beyond all, and in none else (whether himself or another); and through the inactivity of all his reasoning powers is united by his highest faculty to it that is wholly unknowable; thus by knowing nothing he knows That which is beyond his knowledge

Here is a translation of The Mystical Theology:

esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII…lTheology.html

It is a short work that while profound and deep can be read fairly quickly, although it must be read meditatively and slowly to fully imbibe its wisdom.