To begin this summary, the rejection of mysticism by contemporary Protestantism should be established
The categorical rejection of mysticism within Protestantism is comparatively recent: essentially it results from the trend known as “dialectical theology” whose major figures were two men of the 20th century: Emil Brunner (1889-1966) and, above all, Karl Barth (1886-1968). These two represent the pillars of contemporary Protestant theology; dialectical theology has exerted a considerable influence on Protestantism in the last fifty years and on Christian theological thought in general.
The first, Emil Brunner, was a Swiss pastor and theologian who taught at the University of Zurich his whole life; the second, Karl Barth, was a pastor and theologian who taught at different universities, in Germany (Göttingen), then Switzerland, after his refusal to preach for the Führer. Brunner, in his Mysticism and the Word, saw mysticism as “the only sizeable adversary of Christian faith for all time”, because it represented “the purest distillation of paganism” within Christianity. Barth's critique was even more radical: faith is distinct from all myth and all mysticism. This rejection appears in various volumes of his key work translated into English under the title Church Dogmatics, a group of 26 booklets which appeared in Geneva between 1953 and 1974. In all the domains of doctrine, revelation, creation, Barth explains that doctrine and mysticism are entirely in opposition. For Barth, mysticism was “man's attempt not only to turn away from the world, but from himself, in order to attain the authentic life, in other words, to attain God.” And, he continued, “mysticism, like atheism is above all the denial of the supernatural world and religion as such, reducing it to pure interiority. In other words, mysticism is latent atheism, it is esoteric.”
This rejection was reiterated as a matter of course by the successors of these two great theologians and is the basis of the strong rejection of mystical spirituality at the heart of the Reformed churches of today.
But if we consider the target of these authors' attacks, we notice that they do not call into question the medieval or classical mystic tradition, but the modernist and liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Schleiermacher was a Protestant theologian and German philosopher at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century whose religious philosophy proposed a system in which the Divine spirit and the spirit of man were essentially the same. In his Discourses on Religion, which appeared in 1799, he developed the following idea: doctrine was not the revealed truth of God, but a formulation by man of their consciousness of God. For him, religious sentiment did not rest on an apprenticeship nor on a common set of morals, but on an innate and immediate consciousness of God. And man could not be autonomous of that (he was absolutely dependent on it). This theory was given the name of “supernaturalist” mysticism and his theology, “theology of sentiment”.
And this was what Brunner and Barth called mysticism. Understood in this way, 'mysticism' was in opposition to Revelation[1] and faith. In effect, if 'mysticism' consists in self-consciousness of the original unity of man with God, knowledge of God is an inherent faculty of man (through a process of introspection) so he has no need of external Revelation. It is therefore the sign of a man's pride in that he seeks to become God (which is the 'sin' par excellence).
From which the often repeated opposition: either one has mysticism (the attempt of man to approach God through his own means) or one has the Word (Revelation from God to man). It should be added that during the years 1920-1930 the work of Meister Eckhart[2] , Tauler[3] and German theology (a treatise on mysticism from the 14th century re-edited by Luther), which exalted the German genius, were being re-read. 'Mysticism' was being employed in a call to rediscover its 'divine roots' beyond all links to historical religions. This also explains the virulent reaction of Brunner and Barth after the second world war.
All the same, one may ask if this critique takes into account all mystic traditions. In fact, the witness given by the Christian mystics of their experience suggests that, for them, mysticism is a spiritual pathway to transformation within themselves, a journey towards change. This means that it is not a philosophical postulate, but a successful process towards man's self-surpassment. To achieve this he must be completely focused on his approach to God. Thus the critique is looking at something other than the lived reality of the Christian mystics. All the same, this critique should be taken into consideration because it warns against the risk run by all mystics, that of religious narcissism as opposed to what Meister Eckhart wrote: “Go and look for yourself, and wherever you find yourself, leave.” Now, the mystical life is not an end in itself, but a pathway to receiving God. And it is clear that, before this significant critique, different movements showed that Protestantism was able to integrate and renew a kind of mystical tradition adapted to the needs of the time, because mysticism is also a way of responding to the spiritual questions of a given period. I therefore propose to go back in time to look at different journeys during the modern era.
