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Mysticism is a concept that we as modern readers lay onto our interpretation of experience recorded by early Christians and others.
As an “-ism,” “mysticism” is not an emic word, a word actually used by ancient people to describe their experiences. It corresponds to no single term in the ancient literature. In fact, when the early Jews and Christians describe their mystical experiences in a single word, they do so most often by employing the term “apokalypsis,” an “apocalypse” or “revelation.” In the Jewish and Christian period-literature, these religious experiences are described emically as waking visions, dreams, trances and auditions which can involve spirit possession and ascent journeys. Usually these experiences are garnered after certain preparations are made or rituals performed, although they can also be the result of rapture. The culmination of the experience is transformative in the sense that the Jewish and Christian mystics thought they could be invested with heavenly knowledge, join the choir of angels in worship before the throne, or be glorified in body.
From an interesting article, “What is Early Jewish and Christian Mysticism?” by April D. DeConick, posted at a website for an interdisciplinary seminar on the Jewish Roots of Eastern Christian Mysticism.
I quote it here because it gave me an ‘aha!’ moment, relating to gaps of understanding we may suffer when we consider early Quaker writings. The early Quakers aren’t quite as remote to us as the early Christians, but sometimes they can seem pretty inaccessible. For instance, the first Quakers readily picked up on themes in the Book of Revelations much more than we might suppose, and much more than we would do today.
That observation can be taken in several directions, I suppose. How about this one? The early Quaker movement was not literally “Primitive Christianity Revived,” but some of its anchoring points in scriptures were the parts of the bible that most reflected ancient mystical tendencies, the place where the ‘primitive’ Christians were reaching toward what we now call mysticism.
That’s an anachronistic line of thinking, I suppose, treating the ‘reaching’ of early Christians as something congruent to ours, as well as congruent to the efforts of early Friends. “Anachronistic” means without proper reference to the course of time. But then, mysticism itself is something beyond time, isn’t it? A yearning, reaching, seeking for (as the Quakers say) “that which is eternal.”
Anyway, some thoughts of an early Saturday morning in December 2007.
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