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Restless Souls. Leigh Eric Schmidt
Читать онлайн.Название Restless Souls
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isbn 9780520954113
Автор произведения Leigh Eric Schmidt
Издательство Ingram
Modern mysticism was always formed as much out of lacking and loss as it was out of epiphanic assurance. For many, it emerged out of an empty space of longing for “a heightened, intensified way of life” and represented a troubled quest for a unifying and integrative experience in an increasingly fragmented world of divided selves and lost souls. In his Recollections (1909) Washington Gladden (1836–1918), a titan among liberal Protestant thinkers and a bellwether activist as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Columbus, Ohio, tried to specify “the changes, which have taken place within the last sixty years in our conceptions of what is essential in religious experience.” He recalled “so many nights, when the house was still, looking out through the casement upon the unpitying stars,…a soul in great perplexity and trouble because it could not find God.” The loss of spiritual experience had become “my problem,” he reported, as he increasingly lived with an ethical Christianity without raptures, without “marked and easily recognizable emotional experience.” Likewise, Vida D. Scudder (1861–1954), an arch–Christian socialist and a much beloved professor of English literature at Wellesley, cultivated her mystical yearnings against a backdrop of religious loss, disorientation, and “inner misery.” Turning to Episcopalian monasticism, medieval Catholic saints, and the Bhagavad Gita as contemplative anchors in her quest for interior stillness amid her exterior struggles on behalf of labor, Scudder was hardly at ease on her journey. The prayer that “punctuated my life for many years”–indeed, she said in old age, “it recurs to this day”–evoked doubt as much as hope: “O God, if there be a God, make me a real person.”41
The turn to mysticism would have meant little if it had been primarily a species of nostalgia for lost faith, something people longed for, even as they got by without significant religious experiences. For many of these innovators, there clearly remained a living power to what they were describing as mysticism or spiritual consciousness. Take, for example, the manuscript account “My Creed So Far As I Have One,” penned by the second-generation Transcendentalist and radical Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911):
When the devout emotions come, says Emerson in substance–I have not the passage at hand–“yield to them; no matter what your theory, leave it as Joseph left his coat in the hands of the harlot, and flee.” In the life of every thoughtful man, no matter how sunny his temperament, there are moments of care, sorrow, depression, perplexity when neither study nor action nor friends will clear the horizon: the tenderest love, the most heroic self-devotion leave the cloud still resting, the perplexity still there. It is at such times that the thought of an Unseen Power comes to help him; by no tradition of the churches, with no apparatus of mythology; but simply in the form that the mystics call “the flight of the Alone, to the Alone.” It may be by the art of a prayerbook; it may equally well be in the depth of a personal experience to which all prayerbooks seem an intrusion. It may be in a church; it may equally well be in a solitary room or on a mountain's height.
Call these powerful experiences what you will, Higginson insisted–prayer, reverie, mystical flight, devout feeling–the critical point was “the genuineness and value of these occasional moments.”42
Religion at its finest had become all about flashes of intensified feeling and transformed vision, about moments of direct experience, however ephemeral. “I had a revelation last Friday evening,” the poet James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) wrote of one such moment. “The air seemed to waver to and fro with the presence of Something I knew not what.” Likewise, in a poem he titled “The Mystic” David Atwood Wasson (1823–1887), another Transcendental preacher of the second generation and a brief successor to Theodore Parker as minister of Boston's Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society, imagined himself becoming “a leaf that quivers in God's joy,” an experience of “pure participation” in the “Mystery of Being.” At one of the early meetings of the Transcendental Club, in May 1837, the group had taken up the question of “what is the essence of religion as distinct from morality,” and Emerson had responded by defining religion as “the emotion of shuddering delight and awe from perception of the infinite.” The definition struck a resonant chord with his associates: Harvard's Convers Francis duly recorded Emerson's phrasing in his journal as representing the pith of the group's conversation.
A couple of years earlier, Orestes Brownson (1803–1876)–who eventually converted to Roman Catholicism, but who was then still in a liberal Protestant phase–had written a review essay titled “Spirituality of Religion” in which he portended much of the ensuing ferment. Feeling the chill of technological practicality all around him, Brownson lamented that “all our mysterious emotions, our interior cravings, [and] vague longings” are “allowed to count for nothing.” He still used spirituality as a metaphysical term in opposition to philosophical materialism, but he also lamented “the want of spirituality” in the quietude of individual souls, the lack of the felt inspirations of the divine spirit. As weary as Emerson of religious formality, Brownson turned for warmth to “the poetry of the soul.” But what, pray tell, were the rhythms and rhymes of that poetry? The awakening of spirituality was experienced, he claimed, as an intuition, an impulse, an energy, an enthusiasm, an inward breathing of God's spirit in the heart, a contemplative stillness, a waiting in silence, “a freedom of soul.” It is hardly surprising that William James, a culminating figure in this New England lineage, imagined mysticism as “original and unborrowed experience” and fleeting “states of insight.”43
If the Transcendentalists often seemed longer on excited prose than extended practice, their aspirations nonetheless carried the day. “Mysticism is an experience,” C. H. A. Bjerregaard said assuredly in one of his lectures in 1896. “Learn to say with Thoreau: ‘I hear beyond the range of sound, / I see beyond the range of sight.’” It would be almost impossible now to think of mysticism as only a wing of Christian theology and practice or as the domain of one small set of Catholic devotees and their few Protestant defenders. The efforts of Coventry and company to treat mysticism in terms of sexual pathology and psychological illusion still resonate, no doubt, with some diehard skeptics. In the early twentieth century, the notion of religion's “erotogenesis”–its origin in “sex mysticism”–gained a genuine intellectual vogue, but the appeal of that position, along with its ability to shock, has now long since dwindled. That kind of explanation hardly enjoys a fraction of the popularity of mysticism considered as a perennial philosophy, an ageless dimension of religious experience, or “a journey of ultimate discovery.” The “mystic heart” beats vibrantly on as part of a “universal spirituality” gleaned from the religions of the world, a pulsing of interconnections still established through the timelessness of mystical states of consciousness.
Even a seemingly quintessential embodiment of the current New Age, the Zen-practicing basketball coach Phil Jackson, partakes as much of mysticism's nineteenth-century exaltation as more recent fads. In his spiritual memoir Sacred Hoops (1995), Jackson tells of his journey from a Pentecostal boyhood in North Dakota to a life of Buddhist meditation in the glamorous world of the National Basketball Association. The major catalyst for the shift in his spiritual sensibilities had actually occurred while he was on the road with the New York Knicks through a close reading of William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, “a book filled with firsthand accounts by Quakers, Shakers, and other Christian mystics.” As Jackson related, “I couldn't put it down.” The book led him to his own form of low-key “mystical experience,” “a quiet feeling of inner peace” for which he had longed as