Mystical Traditions

Notes on the Mystic

first part

Paulo J S Bittencourt

All religious experiences in the world are permeated by mystical traditions.
Religious experiences understand the dimension of religiosity as a concrete experience, subjective and inter-subjective, of those demands for meaning that are anchored in beliefs in transcendental spheres of existence or simply in religious feeling, beyond – or even despite – the religious phenomenon. institutionally constituted.
The attempt to define the mystical experience, in turn, raises more elastic controversies. The term mystical, for example, would have been used for the first time, at least in the Western world, in the writings in Greek attributed to Dionysius, known as “Corpus Areopagiticum”. These texts would have decisively influenced the entire Christian mystical tradition of the Western High Middle Ages (476-1066). Its author, known as Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite or simply Pseudo-Dionysius, was apparently an Eastern mystical theologian from Syria who lived between the end of the 5th century and even the 6th century. His authentic name is unknown, he introduces himself as Dionysius, that Athenian member of the Areopagus who, as we read in Acts of the Apostles (17: 34), was converted by the Apostle Paul to Christianity.
A possible definition of mystical experience that could be valid for all religious traditions, as a kind of common denominator beyond the irreducible specifications that characterize them, would be a direct, contemplative and intuitive experience of what is called “Divine Presence”.
Now, Pseudo-Dionysus conceived the mystical experience more in its theological meaning than in terms of an existential experience. I would venture to assume that the reasons for his caution lie in the fact that Christianity, as one of the three monotheistic-Abrahamic religions, has always tended to affirm the absolute transcendence of what it conceives as divine. In this sense, Judaism, Christianity and Islam would be systems of religious beliefs for which it is always necessary to affirm the absolute distinction between, on the one hand, the divine and spiritual world and, on the other, the material and natural world. Therefore, I repeat, it is in this sense, and only in this sense, that these religions can be defined as dualistic, as opposed to the notion of monism, when, in this case, the divine and nature are conceived as a single reality.
Christian apologists could retort that the centrality of their dogma of the Incarnation, that is, the notion that the Son, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, became human in Jesus of Nazareth, would constitute, par excellence, the greatest affirmation of divine immanence and human divinization that can be seen in the history of religious thought. In fact, in the “Letter to the Colossians” (1: 15), the Apostle Paul states that Christ is the image of the invisible God. It is a proclamation that Jews and Muslims have almost always taken as an idolatrous desecration of God’s most absolute transcendence. The great literary critic Harold Bloom, of Jewish origin, explained the problem very well in his book “Jesus and Yahweh”. See, for example, the radical iconoclasm, that is, the rejection of the image representation of the divine, between the Jewish and Muslim religions. Without a doubt, Christianity in its first centuries was impacted by the iconoclastic spirit of the offspring from which it derived – Judaism – since the image representations of Jesus always consisted of indirect references to his person, such as the Christogram formed by the initial Greek letters of “ Xhristos” – the “Chi” and “Ro” –, the images of the fish, the bread – symbol of the Eucharist – or the lamb. Yes, Christianity, especially that of Roman Catholics and Orthodox, despite the iconoclastic resistance in the Byzantine world of the 8th century and those derived from the reformist movements of Protestantism, asserted itself through its syncretism with the Hellenistic world, for which the gods they have always been venerated through images, like a religion imbued with a deeply anthropomorphic religious art. I would content myself with mentioning, here, only the famous eastern icons of Christ Pantocrator, the “Almighty Christ”, also disseminated in the western areas of Europe, influenced from the 6th century onwards by Byzantine culture.
However, no matter how much Christian theologians try to substantiate the premise that God became human so that humans could become divine, I tend to believe that they themselves would never relapse into the “daring” of assuming that we will substantially become Christ, on the contrary perhaps what Buddhists say, for example, when they believe that the condition of Buddha, “the Awakened One”, or the state of Buddhahood, can be experienced by all of us precisely because this would be our true nature.

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Professor Paulo Bittencourt is a brilliant teacher of Ancient and Medieval History at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul UFFS [Erechim Campus], Brazil. He contributes articles regularly, and is a columnist of a periodical too. He has several books to his credit. He is an ardent student of Vedanta.