ONE of the commonest of the criticisms which are brought against the mystics is that they represent an unsocial type, of religion; that their spiritual enthusiasms are personal and individual, and that they do not share or value the corporate life and institutions of the church or community to which they belong.gnosis And as a matter of fact, the relation that does and should exist between personal religion and the corporate life of the church frequently appears in them in a peculiarly intense, a peculiarly interesting form; and in their lives, perhaps, more easily than elsewhere, we may discern the principles which do or should govern the relation of the individual to the community.what is mysticism

True mystics, often mislabeled as “religious individualists can be viewed as taking personal religion to its optimal power. If we believe his account is true, it means he has had an interaction with the spiritual side of things and and is aware of it. This transcends the normal experience, and seems to be independent of the general religious consciousness of the community to which he or she belongs. A mystic talks to God as one human being to another, and not as a spokesman for his tribe. His life is not directed by faith, but by knowledge and reason that was acquired by unmitigated communication with God.The certainty then gained - a certitude which he cannot explain or share, and which is not generally diffused - governs all his reactions to the Universe around him. Even in his darkest times when he loses his entire sense of spiritual reality, it still continues to support him.

This personality seems to stand without the need of support, while the smaller nature,having more of a religious consciousness, recieves from the corporate spirit. But even so, the term ‘mystic’ alone indicates a certain aloofness from the majority, suggesting that he holds a secret that the community together does not and cannot share and that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise.we indicate a certain aloofness from the crowd, suggest that he is in possession of a secret which the community as a whole does not and cannot share; that he lives at levels to which they cannot rise. It seems that a lot of the distrust of him comes from the feeling of independence from the group that he experiences - his apparent separation from the often clumsy and always symbolic methods of institutional religion, and the further fact that his own methods and results cannot be criticized or checked by those who have not shared them. “I spake as I saw,” David said and the people who did not agree with him couldn’t do anything except say silent.

Yet this common opinion that the mystic is a lonely soul wholly absorbed in his vertical relation with God, that his form of religious life represents an opposition to, and an implicit criticism of, the corporate and institutional form of religious life; this is decisively contradicted by history, which shows us, again and again, the great mystics as the loyal children of the great religious institutions, and forces us to admit that here as in other departments of human activity the corporate and the individual life are intimately plaited together. Even those who have left the church that raised them have now found that they seem to draw devout followers to them and have become leaders of their own groups now. So, we can question the link between what the mystic may receive from the communal interaction and sense of community, versus what the religious organization will gain from the mystic.

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