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by Arthur Foote
Mysticism and Liberal Religion
The Rev. Arthur Foote, DD, minister emeritus of Unity Church of St. Paul, Minnesota, was the 1959 Minns Lecturer and is the author of “Taking Down the Defenses,” issued in paperback by Beacon Press; the 1954 AUA Lenten Manual; other UA publications; and magazine articles.
Francis G. Peabody, for many years on the faculty of the Harvard Divinity School, went to the University of Halle in Germany for post-graduate study just about a century ago. On this arrival there, the “learned and saintly” Professor Tholuck asked him in what communion of Christians he had been reared. Peabody answered that he was a Unitarian and the son of a Unitarian minister. “Ah!” said the great scholar, “the Unitarians, they are mystics.”
That was hardly the comment Peabody expected, or that we would expect. Nevertheless, it is probably that many of the names of Unitarians with which Tholuck would have been familiar were persons interested in religious experience, in direct apprehension of spiritual reality. Channing, for instance, who wrote of the “one sublime idea” that had taken possession of his mind—“the greatness of the soul, its divinity, its union with God.” Or Emerson: “Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the soul.”
Can a mystic be a Unitarian Universalist? Of course. Within the inclusiveness of our movement, whoever find themselves at home among us are welcomed. Freedom of belief is a central tenet, the freedom to believe as well as to doubt, to affirm as well as to deny.
But let’s be sure we know what we are talking about. This word “mystic” is a fuzzy one, and for many a term of mild reproach. Perhaps this is because in English we try to cover with one word two divergent, even conflicting meanings. In German, Rufus Jones once noted, the word “mysticismus” stands for the occult and the abnormal, and “mystik” means “the theory that God and man are akin and in a reciprocal relationship.”
Currently there is burgeoning interest anew in the occult. All manner of bizarre new movements have attained at least momentary popularity, for reasons complex and perplexing, and well worth exploring. But Unitarian Universalists historically and presently are seldom attracted to what I would call the pseudo-mysticism of “mysticismus.” We are too wedded to belief in reason, to the proposition that before we allow ourselves to be persuaded something is true we must subject it to as rigorously honest intellectual examination as we are able. Gullibility and credulity are not human traits we admire.
However, if the truer meaning of mysticism is what the Germans mean by “mystik”—that human beings can and often do experience something of God directly, then historically speaking at least many Unitarians and Universalists have found themselves sympathetic if not actively drawn to mysticism.
Can a mystic be a Unitarian Universalist? Yes, of course. But the question more accurately phrased is: Will religious liberals who are mystically inclined find with us a congenial religious atmosphere? I say “mystically inclined” because there are great variations of degree in the definiteness of the religious or mystical experience. The mystic in the sense of one who has had an overwhelming ecstatic encounter with God—or Brahman, or whatever name be given—is a rare individual. But many human beings, maybe nearly all at one time or another, do experience something, some awareness of divinity, of “a Spirit vast as life and love.” The experience may be highly diluted, and very transient; hence, memory of it may soon grow dim and in the flood of other experiences be all but forgotten. But racially speaking, mild or powerful, religious experience is persistent.
Mysticism, I suggest, is a word properly covering a wide gamut of human experiences with the divine, ranging from the merest fleeting intimations of a Something More to the relatively rare overwhelming encounter that may dramatically change the whole course of a person’s life, turning it around, giving it new focus, new power, new purpose.
So defined, most Unitarian Universalists, like almost everyone else, fall somewhere along the scale from zero to one hundred. Few are without some trace of mystical inclination, even as few have had a clear-cut personal encounter with God of such magnitude to entitle them to be called “mystics.” Each of us can decide where on such a scale we belong.
The mystically inclined religious liberals seeking our company should find themselves in reasonably congenial surroundings. They should be warned, however, that many of us are come-outers from more orthodox denominations, and have brought with us, quite understandably, strong antipathy to traditional religious language—to words like God and prayer and mysticism. Many of us were drawn to our churches and fellowships because here we can think for ourselves and freely voice our doubts. We treasure freedom from cant and pomposity; we are eager for novelty, for fresh and natural ways to express our religious feelings. But beneath our iconoclastic exterior, our freely voiced negativisms, the understanding observer will perceive thirst for living water, hunger for genuine religious experience. This is as true of the humanists and agnostics among us as of those who more easily accept and appreciate traditional means of expression. After all, it is the noted British scientist and humanist, Sir Julian Huxley, who in his Religion Without Revelation wrote that “the religion of the future must be based on the consciousness of sanctity in existence.”
“When we have broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God fire the heart with his presence.” Thus Emerson in The Over-Soul.
Shy away from the word “God” we may—many of us do. But the word is not the reality. Long ago someone said: “The learned talk of God and his name is on their lips, but the poor have Him in their hearts.” We’d say it differently: There is all too much talk of God in this world that has little genuine substance behind it. There are all too many for whom the “god of rhetoric” is but a mask disguising hollowness of spirit. Conversely, there are many, learned and untutored alike, who are reluctant, perhaps downright unwilling, to speak of God, who yet have “Him in their hearts.” They are the poor—not moneywise necessarily—but the “poor in spirit,” as Jesus called them: the humble, the merciful, the just and loving.
Long, long ago, the German mystic, Meister Eckhart, said a strange thing: that the purpose of true religion is to “get rid of God.” What a paradox! I do not pretend to understand his meaning fully. But I sense that the God he wished us to be rid of was the distant God “out there,” the “god of tradition” and priestcraft, the invention of theologians and dogmatists to explain the inexplicable—god as alien and other, a cosmic dictator. Banish that kind of conception of god, in order to find God where ultimately alone he can be found—in the human heart. Was Meister Eckhart thinking of Jeremiah’s ringing prophecy that in the days to come the Lord will make a new covenant with the house of Israel?
“I will put my law in their inward parts,
And I will write it in their hearts….
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbor,
And every man his brother, saying Know the Lord;
For they shall all know me,
From the least unto the greatest of them, saith the Lord.”
When all mankind indeed knows God, is at one with God, then we shall be rid of him—rid, that is, of all need for talk about him, all need to have his name upon our lips.
Meanwhile, until that far distant day, we must do our best to differentiate between those who talk much about God, but have him not in their hearts, and those however reticent who do.
And if you who chance to read these words are a religious liberal with mystic inclinations, know that you will be most welcome in our movement. If perchance you hear less talk about God than you yourself might wish, remember Emerson. We may have “broken our god of tradition and ceased from our god of rhetoric,” but do not leap too quickly to the conclusion that we are just cold-blooded rationalists who have forgotten the age-old human hunger for authentic religious experience.
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