50 Key Concepts in Theology

Mysticism
The belief that God can be encountered directly through prayer and other
spiritual disciplines.
The word ‘mysticism’ derives from the Greek term mysterion, meaning
‘secret’. In the New Testament the word mysterion is used to describe the
hidden meaning of the cosmos: the parables of Jesus are described as
mysterion, and St Paul speaks about the mysterion as ‘the secret and hidden
wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glorification’ (1
Cor. 2:7).
Now the word ‘mysticism’ is used in a catch-all sense to indicate any
approach to religious life and theology that tries to access dimensions of
experience normally concealed in everyday life. We may speak of mysticism
in the experience of music, art, literature, philosophy, meditation and nature.
Mystical experiences may or may not be theistic, may or may not involve a
direct divine encounter, and may occur in a range of religious and non-
religious individuals. Some mystical experiences are rooted in a specific
religious tradition, and others point to a universal and eternal dimension
beyond religion.
When we try to define mystical experience, we soon find that it resists
easy description. William James (in his Varieties of Religious Experience)
argued that ‘ineffability’ is the defining characteristic of mystical religion,
meaning that it transcends mere language.
The mystical approach to God is also normally distinguished from
rational theology. Mysticism transcends ordinary knowledge of God and
theological reasoning: the mystic encounters the essence of the reality of God,
beyond mere ideas about him. Thus the mystic may often speak about his/her
experience in metaphors, paradoxes and apparent impossibilities.
Mystical experience is normally seen as transcending or transfiguring
ordinary sense experience. The mystic may, for example, claim to experience
something mystical in seeing a beautiful sunset, but the mystical content of
this experience is not publicly verifiable, and someone else seeing exactly the
same event may not perceive it as having any religious content.
There are many examples of mystical experience in the Bible. Moses is
recorded as having mystical experiences of God, and the prophets received
visions from God. Jesus’ disciples saw him strangely ‘transfigured’ in the
company of Elijah and Moses. And St Paul was converted in a mystical
encounter with Jesus.

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Mystical experience has always been an important dimension of
Christian experience and theology. The influence of Plato and Plotinus on the
Christian mystical tradition has been very significant. Plato emphasised the
role of love and desire, and saw the movement towards the divine as a
dialectical process of reasoning guided by an inner love of truth. Plotinus saw
the ascent towards God (or ‘the One’) as a natural movement of God’s
creative energy back to himself. God emanates himself out into the created
order, and this emanation draws back to him like a tidal current. Through
spiritual friendship (the so-called ‘Platonic friendship’) and intellectual
reflection, the inner spiritual person may attain a sense of unity with God.
(See ‘Negative Theology’.)
The principal difficulty of all mysticism is that it remains personal to the
individual. If mystical experience is ‘ineffable’, then it cannot be
communicated directly to others. If mysticism is non-rational, or supra-
rational, then it cannot easily be explained to others. And if it transcends the
ordinary public senses, then it cannot be shown to others. This gives
mysticism a strongly private character.
It is for this reason, among others, that mysticism has been so congenial
to our individualistic, post-modern culture in which New Age religions have
flourished on talk of ineffable, personalised truth and transcendent
experiences.
The most vital strain of Christian mysticism today is arguably to be found
in the music of composers such as Oliver Messiaen, Henryk Górecki, Arvo