The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 1 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
In India and Tibet, again, Brahmanism and Buddhism may be said to have
divided these three elements between them, the former representing as
great an excess of the external as Buddhism does of abstruse reasoning
and pessimistic emotion. Mahometanism, while combining, in very
imperfect proportions, all three elements within itself, lays special
stress upon the first, the external element; and though harbouring, for
centuries now and more or less everywhere, the third, the mystical
element, looks, in its strictly orthodox representatives, with
suspicion upon this mysticism.
Judaism was slow in developing the second, the intellectual element;
and the third, the mystical, is all but wholly absent till the Exilic
period, and does not become a marked feature till still later on, and
in writers under Hellenistic influence. It is in the Book of Wisdom,
still more in Philo, that we find all three sides almost equally
developed. And from the Hasmonean period onwards till the destruction
of Jerusalem by Titus, we find a severe and ardent external,
traditional, authoritative school in the Pharisees; an accommodating
and rationalizing school in the Sadducees; and, apart from both, more a
sect than a school, the experimental, ascetical, and mystical body of
the Essenes.
But it is in Christianity, and throughout its various vicissitudes and
schools, that we can most fully observe the presence, characteristics,
and interaction of these three modalities. We have already seen how
the New Testament writings can be grouped, with little or no violence,
according to the predominance of one of these three moods, under the
heads of the traditional, historic, external, the “Petrine” school; the
reasoning, speculative-internal, the Pauline; and the experimental,
mystical-internal, the Joannine school. And in the East, up to Clement
of Alexandria, in the West up to St. Augustine, we find the prevalence
of the first type. And next, in the East, in Clement and Origen, in
St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the Alexandrian and the Antiochene school
generally, and in the West, in St. Augustine, we find predominantly a
combination of the second and third types. The Areopagitic writings of
the end of the fifth century still further emphasize and systematize
this Neo-Platonic form of mystical speculation, and become indeed
the great treasure-house from which above all the Mystics, but also
largely the Scholastics, throughout the Middle Ages, drew much of their
literary material.
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