The Fault in Our Religion

(4-minute read) – It is incorrect to think that all great mystical traditions come from the East. This error is The Fault in Our Religion.

In fact, Christianity has a rich mystical tradition. Europe just lost sight of it for a while, and unfortunately much of Christiandom still misses it.

The West lacks appreciation of their own mystical traditions because of the history of the development of European thought.

At a point after the reformation, rational, logical thought involving rigorous mental activity became the buzz. The dominance of this way, especially after the Reformation, proceeded from the rise of scholasticism in the development of Western academia. It was at the height of the discursive tradition of prayer – prayers of many words!

This was in contrast to the way of affective prayer of monasticism, or the mystical tradition – the way of knowing in unknowing – the way of less words.

This way imputes knowledge and understanding to the mystic in a more mysterious way. In fact, for affective prayer to bear fruits it requires passivity of the mind, and letting go of logic and rationality.

The first way is called active knowing and the second passive knowing.  Actually, calling the mystical tradition the second way, is misleading since the mystical way of unknowing preceded scholasticism.  In fact mysticism, found in ancient and diverse forms of animism, is arguably, the very start of humankind’s quest for spiritual understanding.

The appreciation of passivity of mind through letting go, through the simple unknowing of mysticism, has always been present, to greater or lesser degrees, in cultures and religions throughout the ages.

What happened in Europe?

In Europe, beginning in the late Middle Ages, and accelerating after the Reformation, mystical prayer and its cornerstone of letting go was discouraged.

Mysticism was regarded as an arrogant aspiration, at best, or as dangerous, at worst.

By 1574 the Father General of the Jesuits forbade affective prayer in favour of the intellectual character of discursive prayer.  Discursive prayer continued to grow in importance during the course of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This growth coincided with the rise of rationalism, positivism and certainty in the Western world.  There was no appetite for letting go and opening to mystical impregnation of knowledge by mysterious and non-empirical methods.

Western culture suffered from this ‘worship’ of certainty and intellectual prowess for centuries. Many seekers in the West had to look to eastern mystical traditions – and in so doing risked being labelled heretics or weirdos.

Only in the last fifty years or so, have some Christian traditions professed that they always had a mystical tradition.

And it goes on. . .

Unfortunately, some have still chosen to stay discursive in their approach to spiritual life – to say more, to dictate more – rather than to encourage mystical openness.

These are the churches that cannot find common ground with other religions, just because their words are different. Because they express themselves in different symbols. They can’t see that the basics of spirituality, beyond words, are the same. They battle to find common ground with their closest Christian brethren, never mind the Jew down the road or the Muslim around the corner.

This article has focused on the fault in Christendom. But as a brief conclusion, note that the same problem arises in any religion when it is word-based. Religion loses touch of all that is mystical, and hence beautiful and spiritual, when it is dogmatic. And then instead of perceiving union, it becomes the very epitome of division.

Consider the Sunnis and the Shiite Muslims. Their great division is based on a disagreement in law on who should be allowed to head the Islamic world. So Sunnis and Shiites have killed each other for centuries. The words on which their pseudo-spirituality is based have made their religion into an excuse to kill.

Many are so mislead by dogmatism that they turn to terrible violence against anyone who doesn’t proclaim exactly the same formulas as they do.

But the mystical branch of Islam, namely Sufism, is far from this violent divisiveness. It is, like all religions’ mystical traditions, rooted in love and a sense of the mystery of oneness in multiplicity. With this root in love the fault in our religion will persist.

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