For the mystics, Jesus was a living embodiment of the possibility of union with God, who could lead them to the same spiritual realization.

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" Jesus was a Jewish heretic who was put to death by the religious

status quo of his day. He preached a radical mysticism that

emphasized a complete surrender of the self to God, through love,

forgiveness and humility – a message that he embodied in his life and

death. An extraordinary influential figure whose nature is shrouded

in mystery and overlaid with myth, he is pictured in many different

ways by the different Christian sects which claim him as their

inspiration. Like the great yogis of India, he was not confined by

the `laws' of nature that so tightly bind the rest of us. He walked

on water, turned water into wine and raised the dead. For most of his

followers he is an incarnation of God, comparable to the avatars of

India. Whatever else Jesus may or may not have been, his wisdom shows

him to have been a remarkable sage who taught with the simple

authority that comes from direct knowledge of God.

 

From its roots in the teachings of an enlightened Jewish carpenter

from Galilee, Christianity expanded via St. Paul, who had previously

been a prosecutor of the new heretical Jewish sect but was converted

by a mystical vision of divine light. By the fourth century

Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman empire,

which focused on making it a dogmatic faith capable of holding an

empire together rather than a personal path to knowledge of God. The

Romans ruthlessly suppressed all the other forms of Christianity that

still flourished at this time, such as the Gnostics, a highly

mystical sect of mainly Jewish Christians largely based in Egypt…

 

In the fifth century the Roman Church split into a more mystical

Eastern Church based in Constantinople, and an authoritarian Western

Church based in Rome – both of which proceeded to excommunicate each

other. In the West, Christian mystics existed always on the edge of

acceptability, often persecuted and excommunicated for their

individualistic ways and heretical ideas. Despite this many great

mystics still emerged, for instance the thirteen-century Italian

ascetic St. Francis of Assisi. As the authoritarianism and corruption

of the official Church became more and more unbearable, many groups

of mystic Christians began breaking away from the suffocating power

of religious dogma, to find their own direct relationship with Christ

and God…

 

Later, however, when Protestantism itself became a religious

orthodoxy, mystical ideas were once again seen as heretical and

unacceptable. Protestant mystics such as the sixteenth-century German

Jacob Boehm found the new religious establishment as intolerant as

its precursor.

 

The mystics claim a direct relationship with God, which the leaders

of the Christian religion have always feared as a threat to their

position as the sole repositories of divine knowledge. Because of

this, much of Christian mysticism has existed outside the mainstream

of the Church. To find the real mystical riches of the Christian

tradition we have to look to its hidden history, which has been

deliberately obscured by the establishment. Some of its greatest

mystics are hardly known. Meister Eckhart, for example, an

extraordinarily clear spokesman for the perennial mystic philosophy,

was generally unheard of until a few decades ago. Whether they

existed within the official Church or in the many heretical groups,

however, the great Christian mystics have all pointed to the same

essential mystic truths. Today, despite an upsurge in Christian

fundamentalism, the spirit of mysticism is re-emerging. Christians

such as William Johnson, Thomas Merton and Bede Griffiths have sought

to incorporate elements of Eastern mysticism into the Christian

faith, both to enhance their own tradition, and to find a common,

multicultural understanding of God.

 

The teaching of the Christian religion has generally been that Jesus

was God made flesh, who suffered and died for the sins of the world,

and that by believing in this a Christian is freed from sin and will

go to heaven when he dies. Up until the Reformation in the sixteenth

century, ordinary Christians were expected to accept such dogmas and

the Inquisition even forbade them to read the Bible for themselves.

For the mystics, however, Jesus' message was one of personal

salvation through the direct experience of God. In the words of

Angelus Silesius, a seventeenth-century Protestant poet who in four

days of ecstatic illumination wrote the 302 verses of the mystic

masterpiece The Cherubinic Wanderer:

 

Christ could be born a thousand times in Galilee –

But all in vain, until he is born in me.

 

For the mystics, Jesus was a living embodiment of the possibility of

union with God, who could lead them to the same spiritual

realization. In the Gnostic scripture called the Gospel of Thomas,

Jesus tells his disciples: `I am not your master. Because you have

drunk, you have become drunk from the bubbling stream which I have

measured out. He who will drink out of my mouth will become as I am;

I myself shall become he, and the things that are hidden will be

revealed to him.'

 

The Complete Guide to World Mysticism (Paperback)

by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, page 86-90

Publisher: Piatkus Books; New Ed edition (October 1998)

ISBN-10: 0749917768

ISBN-13: 978-0749917760