The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Religion
The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends, Volume 2 (of 2)
Hügel, Friedrich, Freiherr von
Catherine, of Genoa, Saint, 1447-1510
And thirdly, here again, even from the point of view of psycho-physical
health and its protection, it is precisely the actual practice and,
as interpreted by it, the deepest sayings of the standard Christian
mystics which are being most powerfully confirmed,--although
necessarily by largely new reasons and with important modifications
in the analysis and application of their doctrine,--by all that we
have gained, during the last forty years, in definite knowledge of
the psycho-physical regions and functions of human nature, and,
during two centuries and more, in enlargement and precision of our
religious-historical outlook.
If we consider the specific health-dangers of this way, we shall find,
I think, that their roots are ever two. These dangers, and with them
the probability of delusion or at least of spiritual barrenness, always
become actual, and often acute, the minute that we allow ourselves to
attach a primary and independent importance to the psycho-physical
form and means of these things, as against their spiritual-ethical
content, suggestions, and end; or that we take the whole man, or at
least the whole of the religious man, to consist of the specifically
mystical habits and life alone. Now the first of these dangers has
been ceaselessly exposed and fought by all the great ethical and
Christian mystics of the past, _e.g._ St. John of the Cross and St.
Teresa; and the latter has been ever enforced by the actual practice,
as social religionists, of these same mystics, even if and when some
of their sayings, or the logical drift of their speculative system,
left insufficient room or no intrinsic necessity and function for such
things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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