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ERNST TROELTSCH
From:
Ernst Troeltsch, The social teaching of the Christian
Churches, v. II,
tr. Olive Wyon, 1931, pp. 730 - 741. Here published without footnotes.
Page 2
Alongside of, or within, the recognized forms of worship, mysticism creates special and more intimate mysteries, in which salvation is appropriated in a peculiarly inward manner; in these mysteries the ancient cults of sacred meals, "feeding upon the god", of sacrifice, of a new birth from the divinity into an immediate eating and drinking of the life of the divinity, become intensified and inward to the point of a real new birth and deification. Mysticism creates prophecies and ecstasies as well as fantastic allegories and a "spiritual" interpretation of the objective side of religion. This mystical sense, however, can also create a passionate realism of communion with the gods, which makes the ancient cults or the accepted rites the means of immediate substantial union. The Hellenistic mysteries united the most coarse and material conceptions with "spiritual" theories which reduced them all to a symbol, which still, however, had a wonderful effect. According to Paul, the Christian Supper of the Lord was itself a mystical creation; and when the Eucharist became an objective ecclesiastical rite, Eucharistic mysticism transformed it, for the second time, into a mystical experience.
Above all, eroticism here plays a leading part, since either the sexual stimulation is also used to stimulate religious enthusiasm, or the latter strengthens and expresses itself in sexual stimulation. The imagery of Love and the "Wine-shops" of Sufi poetry, and certain Christian interpretations of the Song of Songs, harp upon the same string in the spiritual life.
On the other hand, this immediacy of feeling likes to escape from the finite world of sense through a spirituality which either treats it with indifference and ignores it, or removes it to a distance by means of ascetic mortifications. Mysticism is thus open to the incursions of a spiritual Pantheism and of a radical Dualism of flesh and spirit, of time and of eternity; and, in connection with it, to the suggestions of an asceticism which crushes all that is finite, or of a Libertinism which treats everything as equally indifferent.
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