An FAQ on Mysticism and the Christian Life.
Essay. Shrouded in secrecy, ancient mystery cults fascinate and capture the imagination. A pendant to the official cults of the Greeks and Romans, mystery cults served more personal, individualistic attitudes toward death and the afterlife.
Smart, Ninian. “Understanding Religious Experience.” Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. Ed. Steven T. Katz. New York, Oxford University Press, 1978. 10-21. This is the first of a series of presentations on the book cited above; Prof. Smart’s is the opening essay in the book. Future essays will be presented as I can pull together time.
Mystical theology is the science which treats of acts and experiences or states of the soul which cannot be produced by human effort or industry even with the ordinary aid of Divine grace.It comprises among its subjects all extraordinary forms of prayer, the higher forms of contemplation in all their varieties or gradations, private revelations, visions, and the union growing out of these.
Sufism was transplanted into North Africa as a result of the expansion of the Rifa'i order into Syria and then Egypt. The presence of Rifa'iyyah inspired the founding of other orders. In the 13th century Badawiyyah was founded in Egypt by Ahmad al-Badawi (1199-1276), who acquired a reputation for mysticism and the performance of miracles.
Discussions of religious experience in terms of feelings, like Schleiermacher’s (1998) “feeling of absolute dependence,” or Otto’s (1923) feeling of the numinous, were important early contributions to theorizing about religious experience, but some have since then argued (see Gellman 2001 and Alston 1991, for example) that religious affective states are not all there is to religious.
Section 4. Mystical Experiences If the heart of religion is in the religious experience, then at the heart of all religious traditions are those experiences in which individuals not only encounter the supernatural but experience a total loss of self and loss of individuality and are in union with the divine, the absolute, the deity, the supernatural.
Mysticism From Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1961) T he warfare between science and theology has been of a peculiar sort. At all times and places - except late eighteenth-century France and Soviet Russia - the majority of scientific men have supported the orthodoxy of their age. Some of the most eminent have been in the majority.