Dom Cuthbert Butler's six characteristics of "Western Mysticism"

Recalling a semi-forgotten modern classic

     It should be evident by now that whenever I use the word “mysticism,” I mean an intuitive tendency that comes naturally to human beings. This is one reason that the qualifier “pragmatic” is in the title of my Substack page (a title which may not be, in retrospect, an ideal one; but after nearly two years, I’ve gotten so used to it that it feels as comfortable now as a pair of old slippers). “Mysticism” is a native quality of the human psyche, as I employ the term, and not synonymous with arcane lore or “esoterica,” or an exclusive “elite” that claims to possess a γνῶσις not accessible to οἱ πολλοί. Nor is it to be merely identified — as too frequently it has been, especially in Roman Catholicism — with apparitions, miracles, locutions, and other “special graces.” All the above have been associated with the term, of course, but mysticism itself is not, in essence, anything extra-ordinary. It is, rather, the perennial sensibility that the fabric of reality depends on an all-encompassing mystery that – through some incomprehensible largesse – allows for a partial disclosure of what or who that is. I agree with G. K. Chesterton, who meant by the word “mysticism” something experienced universally – even commonly – by human beings, and not what Cardinal Newman had in mind when he allegedly quipped that mysticism begins in a “mist” and ends in “schism,” to which was added later that it also centers on “I” (I’m rather dubious about the attribution of this remark to Newman, by the by). Chesterton associated mysticism with good mental hygiene, opposing it to the tunnel vision of the materialist. The desiccated but pugnacious physicalism of someone like Richard Dawkins in our day would have come as no surprise to him: “He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is sharpened to one painful point. He is without healthy hesitation and healthy complexity.” “Materialists and madmen,” he wrote, “never have doubts… [And this is] the chief mark and element of insanity; we may say in summary that it is reason used without root, reason in the void.” His corrective to this myopic condition was this: