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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 7
This technical mysticism in the narrower sense, with its own philosophy of religion, has also appeared in various religious spheres with a remarkable similarity of form: in Indian Brahmanism and its repercussion in Buddhism, in the Sufism of the Parsees and of Persian Muslims, in the Neo-Platonism of the Greeks, in the varied syncretism of late antiquity which is known as Gnosticism. In the guise of Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and Gnosticism it presented itself to the Early Church, which seized it eagerly as a scientific foundation for its own religious doctrine, in the same way as it took Stoicism into account for its moral and social teaching, as a scientifically worked out analogy for its system of ethics. The stages of this development within Christianity are clearly defined. Jesus is not a mystic. He lives simply with His gaze fixed on God, urges practical sanctification of life, and proclaims the imminent realization of the ideal.
Paul and the "spiritual" men turn inward, spiritualize, and revive the Christ-cult and the Christian tradition which had grown up in the Early Church apart from philosophy and speculation, and with a free use of the mystical language of the ancient mysteries. The Gnostics, and the philosophers and theologians of the Early Church, open their minds to the mystical philosophy of religion, emphasizing more or less the concrete dependence upon Christian history, and affirming in varying tones of emphasis the practical and ethical idea of personality.
Mysticism in the narrower and the technical sense of the word, the mysticism which is concerned with the philosophy of religion, therefore, also developed an immense importance within Christianity. It helped the scientific theology of the early Christians to bring their faith in the Divine incarnation, in the hero of the cultus, in Christ, into line with the scientific formulas of the doctrine of the Trinity, which was conceived at first in harmony with the theory of emanations, and then as the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father (ὁμοούσιον). It helped early theology to define the possession of salvation as something to be attained through union with God in the Christian cultus, and to give a religious and philosophical meaning to its sacraments. It was also of value for the apologetic of the early Christians, since mysticism represented the natural universal religious consciousness which comes to completion in the Incarnation of the Logos and in the sacraments of the Church.
