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Why mysticism is not an “Option”

Romano Guardini described, in the 1950s, a neo-pagan totalitarianism that no longer tolerates any threats to its secularist, atheistic, and humanist dogmas, one in which Christians and other theists are called to brook no compromise and live out their Faith all the more integrally and heroically. But Guardini’s prescription for action is something at once more bracing and consoling than Rod Dreher’s.

Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was an Italian-born German Catholic priest whose many books included "The End of the Modern World" (1957). [Images: Wikipedia]

“Only someone who has broken out of the restricted horizon of ideology can see clearly what has been left behind. And only those who have fully contemplated the abyss can be sure of having attained the spiritual truth capable of overcoming it.” — David Walsh

The late Fr. Josef Zycinski, in his great book, God and Post-Modern Thought, writes:

To live the faith of Abraham is to be ready at a day’s notice to pack the tents symbolizing everything that is dear to one and to go to a new, unknown place, which God will indicate, completely independently of rational calculations or our emotional predilections. To live the faith of Abraham in the cultural context of postmodernity is to be able calmly to pack up the tents of congenial concepts and arguments, not in order to set out on a desert path, but to set them up again in a different context and in a different form, in a place indicated by God. In an Abrahamic testimony of faith, one may not lose heart on account of the wildness of new places or on account of a feeling of loneliness in a foreign landscape. We must constantly seek the face of the Lord (Psalms 27: 8), listening carefully to His voice, which could be either a discreet whisper or a delicate breeze (1 Kings 19: 12). We need to love God more than the logic of convincing deductions and the collection of respected authorities, to which we like to refer in times of difficulty. We need to accept the provisionality of contingent means, in order that the Divine Absolute might all the more clearly reveal in them his power. Only then does the contemporary “wandering Aramaean” reveal the style in which, amidst the darkness of our doubt, flashes the light of the great adventure of our faith.

I think Zycinski’s words are prophetic, and they pose a serious challenge to the Benedict Option. “We need to accept the provisionality of contingent means, in order that the Divine Absolute might all the more clearly reveal in them his power.” The Benedict Option, on the other hand, seeks permanency in small Christian enclaves. But there is a good chance that these will simply not be available to us, or at least not in the traditional mold described in Rod Dreher’s book. If Zycinski is right about what it means to live the fulness of the Abrahamic Faith today, Catholic traditionalism in general, and the Benedict Option in particular, are simply not adequate “options” for today’s world.

Zycinski’s words in the quote above echo and confirm the prophetic and disconcerting thought of Romano Guardini. In his book, The End of the Modern World, written in 1956, the great Catholic theologian wrote:

…the new age will declare that the secularized facets of Christianity are sentimentalities. This declaration will clear the air. The world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean. . . . As unbelievers deny Revelation more decisively, as they put their denial into more consistent practice, it will become the more evident what it really means to be a Christian. At the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies. He must learn to exist honestly without Christ and without the God revealed through Him; he will have to learn to experience what this honesty means. Nietzsche has already warned us that the non-Christian of the modern world had no realization of what it truly meant to be without Christ. The last decades have suggested what life without Christ really is. The last decades were only the beginning.

Guardini described a world in the 1950s like the one Dreher describes now, one of a neo-pagan totalitarianism that no longer tolerates any threats to its secularist, atheistic, and humanist dogmas, one in which Christians and other theists are called to brook no compromise and live out their Faith all the more integrally and heroically. But Guardini’s prescription for action is something at once more bracing and consoling than Dreher’s. Nothing but the “free union of the human person with the Absolute through unconditional freedom will enable the faithful to stand firm—God—centered—even though placeless and unprotected.” Placeless and unprotected.

He goes on: “Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love that flows from one lonely person to another, involving a courage of the heart born from the immediacy of the love of God as it was made known in Christ. . . . Perhaps love will achieve an intimacy and harmony never known to this day.” In short, Guardini sees no real possibility for safe havens of Christian culture, and even if we could create and live in them, I interpret Guardini to mean that they would tend to stunt our spiritual growth by becoming halls of mirrors insulating us from the love we need to give—indeed be—to the lost ones of the world: “one lonely person to another.”

What Guardini is telling us is both much, much worse and much, much better that Dreher’s depiction of our situation. Worse, in the sense that although the Benedict Option is a crucial strategy for theists, it very well may not be possible. If Guardini is right, our situation is a gift, a priceless treasure, for God will give each of us who ask for it the grace to endure the darkness, barbarism, and loss of our customary sensible and cultural signs of God’s love and presence. And we will emerge from this purgation with our idols and crutches and safety nets broken and as useless as they always were. “We need to accept the provisionality of contingent means, in order that the Divine Absolute might all the more clearly reveal in them his power.” Thus we will be able to know and experience God as He is, to the fullest extent possible in this mortal coil, and be conduits for his inexorable Love which will conquer all and save all.

We can surely try to opt out of the decaying culture and to shore up theistic culture in small enclaves of likeminded devotees of Tradition and the Transcendent, but whatever we do, we must do the one thing most necessary, as Mary did at the feet of Jesus, while Martha was busy with other things she thought more important—Mary knelt and adored Christ. We must all become mystics now, in intimate and real contact with God, so we can be His hands, heart, and voice in our ever darkening world. As the German theologian Karl Rahner once prophesied, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he will not be at all.” Rahner wrote:

Do not despair when experiencing despair: Let the despair take all away from you, since what is taken from you is only the finite, the unimportant, even if it may have been ever so wonderful and great, even if it may be yourself with your ideals, with your smart and detailed plans for your life, with your image of a god that looks more like you than the incomprehensible one.  Allow all the exits to be blocked, for they are only exits into the finite and paths into dead ends.  Do not be frightened by the solitude and forsakenness in your internal prison, which appears to be as dead as a grave.  For if you stand firm, refusing to flee from despair and in the despair over the loss of your former idol that you called God you do not doubt the true God; if you stand firm, which is a true miracle of grace, then you will realize suddenly that your grave-like prison cell is locked up only against what is meaningless and finite, that its deathly emptiness is only the vastness of God’s presence, that silence is filled with a word without words by the one who stands above all names and who is all in all.  The silence is his  silence.  He is saying that he is here. . . . He is here.

This is not lost on some of our youth. I end with a quote from a paper of one of my students at Wyoming Catholic College. She wrote this after studying postmodern philosophy and literature, both godless (Camus, Derrida, and Foucault) and godful (Dostoyevsky, Eliot, and Girard):

Living in the modern era is a gift. Despite the broken traditions, abolished communities, and heap of worn-out philosophies, this era is still a gift.  In one way, man can no longer distract himself with human constructs.  They have all failed, and anyone who lives in denial of this failure will be forced to face tragedy at some point like the grandmother (even if that point only comes at his or her own death.)  In another way, man is called to even more intimate encounter with God as a result of this Wasteland.  Quite literally, we have been placed in a society that purges us of pride and confidence in human accomplishment.  The disparity of the Wasteland calls for deeper love and communion, but God provides a more intimate way of encountering Himself to overshadow this disparity.  And, this is a gift.


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About Dr. Thaddeus J. Kozinski 2 Articles
Dr. Thaddeus J. Kozinski is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Wyoming Catholic College and author of The Political Problem of Religious Pluralism: And Why Philosophers Can't Solve It.

13 Comments

  1. Dr Thaddeus Kozinski assessment is correct. And Guardini is well quoted. The world’s barbarism is not the old subject to conversion. The New Age barbarism has tasted Christ, chewed Him up, spit Him out. Hiding in presumed safe enclaves is retreat from the inevitable. As a Church we need to stand our ground. The battle will take place in the trenches. The parish community. There is where we’re now called to suffer and experience despair but not be conquered by it as The Apostle who often suffered interior affliction and doubt, a spiritual thorn in his side. Padre Pio advised if we are in The Garden of Gethsemani don’t ask God to remove the anguish. Ask Him for strength to endure it. That is contemplation. Faith that acknowledges the Divine Presence in adversity. That the world perceive in us the face of Christ.

  2. Romano Guardini was very prophetic, he wrote in the same The End of the Modern World, that “”With the denial of Christian Revelation genuine personality had disappeared from the human consciousness…..”When man drops the ethical reins, he places himself utterly at the mercy of power. In the long run, domination requires not only the passive consent, but also the will to be dominated, a will eager to drop personal responsibility and personal efforts.” These are terrible words but that seem to describe our present times.

    As I understand we don’t belong to ourselves, we belong to God. From Him we came, to Him we must return, and we must keep this final end in mind to live in this world. We will need, as Guardini said, much courage. Certainly we will endure the loneliness of faith, face persecution, but the Lord walks with us.

    “On what does the spirit’s health depend? First Plato and later in the fullness of Revelation St. Augustine made this clear: The health of the spirit depends on its relation to truth, to the good and holy. The spirit thrives on knowledge, justice, love, adoration — not allegorically, but literally.” _ Romano Guardini.

    • Sophia my guess is you’re Sophia Marie. If so welcome back to the fray. Either way welcome. Enjoyed your comment.

      • Thank you. Yes,it’s me Father Peter 🙂 Let us support one another through prayers and giving our thoughts in this good website.Have you ever read Dominican theologian and biblicist Dominique Barthélemy? I am re-reading Dieu et son Image, it was published in English as God and His Image. It’s a wonderful work. One of the things he wrote in this book is that at different times in history God must tame man anew, so that he becomes what he was created to be, a real people of God, the new Israel. This little passage gave me much to think.We certainly need God’s intervention, may we stand all with courage, so that when he comes again, he will still find faith.

    • Sophia thought on your quote from Guardini “domination requires not only the passive consent, but also the will to be dominated” and recalled crowds of prewar Germans adulating Hitler. They had a strange subservient look, a seeming want to be dominated. Similar perhaps worse among North Koreans and Kim Jong Un. I wasn’t aware of Guardini’s words. As you said they were prophetic.

      • Yes Father Peter. It’s a strange thing what is happening today too. This quote of Guardini also makes me think of our own predicament here in Europe and in other parts of the world. Aren’t we also consenting on what is happening, the illegal immigration, the problems in the Church? Is it because we refuse to take responsibility, as Guardini said, or is it something else? Or maybe both? Read yesterday Pope Benedict’s amazing note that was read at the funeral of holy cardinal Meisner. Pope Benedict admits that the Church is almost capsizing ( his words approximatively), taht teh shepherds must follow Jesus, not teh world, but certainly not only him knows that. Why no one else really does something about it? I am doing three hours of adoration, before I did only one hour daily. But times require that we make time for adoration and personal prayer, as Guardini suggests.Que notre vie entière soit une hymne à la vérité de l’Évangile.

        • Sophia. My sister in Christ. You’re right on track. This moral pacifism is a virulent disease that is not simply evident in the extreme examples I gave. Rather entire cultures here in Am perhaps more so in Europe. I believe the malaise is willed. A spiteful insult to a God refused nonetheless feared. Conscience informs apostates of truth that cannot be refuted. Why no else really does something about it is part of the malaise. Even affecting the faithful. With you I am committed to deepening prayer. As a priest I seek God’s counsel.

          • Father Peter, it’s frightening but at the same time almost exhilarating, I would say. Because somehow people were asleep, we were too comfortable in our prosperity, used to the Church as a sure guide, moral principles, etc. Suddenly all this is threatened. The ambiguity of this papacy, the dangerous direction of the world, all this serves to awake those who were asleep and had become lukewarm. Isn’t that said that we value only what we have lost? Like Dominique Barhélemy, who said, God brings his chastisement to his people and amost anihilates them ( Is. 66:15-16), in order that a new birth may take place, which is in keeping with the evolution of humanity that is on the way to re-creation : the eternal Israel. Christ is in our midst, I feel this more than never, and if He is with us, nothing can separate us from Him.

  3. Intriguing piece.

    But it confuses me, as it seems to almost want to dispute Dreher’s Benedict Option. But he would certainly agree: “We can surely try to opt out of the decaying culture and to shore up theistic culture in small enclaves of likeminded devotees of Tradition and the Transcendent, but whatever we do, we must do the one thing most necessary.” Though he might also choose to simplify it down to, “We have to make sure our kids receive the faith before we can try to help them keep it!” Which is just what looks like Wyoming College seems to be trying to do … although I hope not with too many quotations from Rahner!

    • Its a both-and. Benedict Option is necessary but not sufficient, and it can, if its limits are not understood, recapitulate and mirror the “answers without questions” mentality of the modern secularism it attempts to escape. Self-justifying Christian communities tend to banish Christ.

  4. “We must all become mystics now, in intimate and real contact with God, so we can be His hands, heart, and voice in our ever darkening world.”

    Too many stop short of being “His hands, heart, and voice in our ever darkening world.” It is easy to imagine oneself a mystic. It is difficult to let the grain of wheat that is our own willful spirit fall into the earth and die.

    “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If any one serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there shall my servant be also.”

    If we subdue our own willful spirit then we become animated by the Spirit of Christ, and can say with St. Paul “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” And then wherever Christ is, we, His servants, will be also. Our hands, heart and voice become His own.

    And for some of you, “you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go.” And you will ask “Quo vadis, Domine?” and then you will go because that is where Christ, Who lives in you, is going.

  5. Philosophers can freely discuss what they think, but what matters is, the “wise”, will always seek God, who is Mercy, Grace and Love, thru His begotten Son, Jesus Christ. God allows negatives to exist precisely so that His light and truth and eternal life, thru Jesus’ example, can be realized. St. Augustine, and St. Thomas are good examples according to God.

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