Mathias's Reviews > Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness

Mysticism is the belief that the individual will be absorbed or reabsorbed into the deity or the absolute. It is therefore incompatible with Christianity and constitutes a heresy that is sometimes affiliated with the occult.

I saw this book on LibriVox several times and it somehow caught my attention. I wanted to know more about Christianity and this was a subject I hadn't dealt with before. Every time I walk my pug I listen to a Christian audiobook and recently I've chosen this one.
I asked three Christians I personally knew (two musician friends, origami repetika and graffiti mechanism, as well as my general practitioner) about Christian mysticism, and all of them were sceptical, although repetika also suggested that some mystics had some interesting things to say. Still, I stayed with my decision to listen the book. And despite my 1 star rating, I don’t regret my choice because it deepened my understanding of mysticism or reabsorption theology.

Unfortunately, the narration of Joy Chan wasn’t all that good so I had trouble keeping focused on the text. And Underhill’s way of writing is subpar, it’s often muddled and confused. She really had a hard time giving her ideas a suitable form. Or her ideas were already a bit loony. So I will give you only very rough summary of what’s in the book.

According to Underhill, there are five successive stages a mystic can be in.
(I used https://web.csulb.edu/~plowentr/under... to help me recollect my memories and also copied some expressions from there.)

They are:
1. Awakening (abrupt and well-marked, accompanied by intense feelings of joy and exaltation)

2. Purgation (mystic becomes aware of the contrast between his perverse self-centred drifting and the clarity of the transcendent)

3. Illumination (purged oneself of attachments to the things of the senses and having substituted them with an attachment to the transcendent. The joy of this stage bears danger: a selfish preoccupation with transcendental joys)

4. The Dark Night Of The Soul (Heart and mind are arid. The mystic must overcome all attachment to the selfish ego in order to merge with the Deity. She does that by giving up the greatest good she has ever known – the joys of stage 3)

5. Union (essentially ineffable. Mystic becomes one with Deity. (Re)absorption takes place)

Stages 1-3 are called the first mystic life and many mystics never go beyond it.

To me, this is a life-negating philosophy. The self, even the selfish self, is not something dirty that has to be purged. Egoism is a necessary strategy to survive, to better oneself and, if this egoism is checked by natural law, to better the world (Adam Smith’s invisible hand). It is obvious that her mysticism is incompatible with Christian orthodoxy. As pointed out in Murray Rothbard’s essay Karl Marx as Religious Eschatologist, “each human individual is made in the image of God, is of supreme importance” and not a “perverse” creation in contrast with God (stage 2). When I read my summary of these stages, my blood runs cold. Why would a sane person want to pursue such a life for him or herself? It is beyond me but I do now understand why there are so few mystics. There is a discrepancy between the amount of mystics and the amount of people who liked this book. If they think that what Underhill has to offer is so great, then why do these people not become mystics? Why do they keep living in stage 0 (which seems to be the way most people live in capitalistic societies)? The reason seems to me that the virtues and comforts of capitalism (constrained egoism, individualistic planning, joy, consumerism, realistic assessing of available resources, …) are openly disliked and rejected in our society. But this is really only openly, in private these virtues and comforts are very much adhered to. How do I know this? Well, obviously because the world has not collapsed. So, while these people are living capitalistically, they use a defence mechanism, perhaps denial, to deal with the mental conflict between reality (stage 0) and wish (stage 5).

Looking at the five stages, I see similarities with the ideology of communism/socialism/leftism. Adherents of these view also often find fault with egoism and self-centredness. Instead of becoming one with God, they want to become one with the State. But this difference vanishes if we remember that for them the State is God. According to Leszek Kolakowski, reabsorption theology or process theology starts with Plotinus, who is quoted by Underhill a lot. Rothbard’s essay mentioned above, explores the connection between reabsorption theology and Marxism.

While Underhill’s book has as subject a theology that is at least almost two thousand years old, it is itself very much a product of its time. She talks about pragmatism and vitalism, which were very much in vogue at the beginning of the last century but are now seldomly talked about. Let’s hope, for humanity’s sake, that we can one day say the same thing about Christian mysticism aka reabsorption theology.