A Response to Suspicion of the Mystical
In a recent conversation with a Christian coworker, I was told, “I am not thrilled about the current trend of mysticism in the church.” Now, she is a lovely and reasonably informed person. More curious and well-read, I suspect, than the average Protestant of her ilk. I have no desire to caricature her or lambast her position. I understand certain concerns and sentiments she must be pushing back against. Still, her comment prompted me to reflect. How could I respond to such an attitude in a meaningful way? How could one explain the value of the mystical to a culture where, both in secular and religious circles, mysticism is viewed as antiquated hocus-pocus at best or an affinity for the occult at worst?
Mysticism not only has a place in Christianity, but I would also argue that, in one form or another, it is a societal inevitability—anyone seeking or seeing meaning, whether in life or in the cosmos, necessarily adopts a mystical perspective. We cannot, say, claim to seek justice without first presupposing a moral balance exists and that a harmony can then be found. We cannot process suffering without interpreting it within a narrative of inherent meaning. Therefore, the modern suspicion of the mystical in the church contributes to the meaninglessness crisis in the West. I am speaking of mysticism conceptually and generally. How that plays out, which forms we adopt, those things certainly require discernment, but we cannot do without it entirely and still find meaning behind existence. The church has the means to offer a grounded mystical perspective as a potent psychological supplement, a spiritual health food. If we do not, society will sate this appetite some other way.
In a larger work, I argue rather passionately for the necessity of the mystical in forming a coherent perspective on reality, particularly for any faith-based worldview. It investigates George Lucas’ “Star Wars as the unconscious myth of the fatherless West.” In a nutshell, I explore a dialogue among C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Plato—their diagnoses of the decline of Western mythos and ethos—and how Star Wars explains the philosophical concerns of these intellectual giants. The paper hones in on the imbalance acutely felt in the masculine soul during a certain civilizational stage, which it appears the West has now entered: godlessness, a fractured cosmology, and the degradation of democracy. The overarching theme is the collapse of the mystical element that precipitates the fall of its most potent pupils, the academy, and the greater polis. Without a uniting principle, a coherent worldview, and belief in heroic virtue, we are doomed to fragmentation, loss of identity, and the machinations of unbridled power.
The Mystical Element of Story (Including the Bible!)
Now one cannot write about Star Wars and neglect to mention the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose work The Hero with a Thousand Faces and concept of “The Hero’s Journey” inspired Star Wars, and for that matter hundreds of films and stories since. In the Jungian tradition, Campbell argued that myth has a universal power that spiritually and psychologically informs both culture and soul. My work specifically draws upon Campbell’s four functions of myth as a framework for the interpretation of all the thinkers involved: Lewis, Nietzsche, Plato and Lucas. The important point here is that the first function of myth is the mystical.
The mystical element, Campbell argued, “is that of reconciling consciousness to the preconditions of its own existence, that is, of aligning waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum of this universe, as it is.” Essentially, when we encounter a mythological story, one of the first things it invites its audience to is an acceptance of a mystery that underlies all that is known. In Star Wars, audiences must accept that beneath the fictional universe is the mysterious element of the Force, which comes a priori to the light and dark, Jedi and Sith, individual experiences or the will of Anakin or Luke. In Genesis, it is made clear that before the cosmos is formed, God was. How, why, we have no idea. It is not explained. It is echoed later in the Gospel of John, but remains a mystery, and the first steps into faith require the convert to accept that the highest echelon of reality is beyond definition and comprehension; it just is. That is why it is called faith, not certainty; we must believe in things unseen. That is the mystical.
The Elimination of Mystical Possibility
How we came to a place where so many Westerners, including much of Christianity, are inherently skeptical, cynical, or pejorative toward the mystical is no mystery, however. We need only to look to Lewis, Nietzsche, and Plato to understand that. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis decried the devolution of the education system: a system that, in his day, began to exclude any sense of objectivity or moral absolutes from the curriculum. The mystical consent to the universe as such was eliminated in favour of subjectivity and personal preferences. Lewis prophesied that this teaching would produce “men without chests,” that is to say that the collapse of the mystical would have a cascade effect; the cosmological (Campbell’s second function) would degrade as well, followed by the moral (third function) and finally the pedagogical (fourth function). In Nietzsche’s famous piece “The Parable of the Madman” he declares the death of God, and goes on to ask, “Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move?” In a world with no horizon, there is nothing that cannot be known, no mystery to be discovered, no quest into the beyond to be taken. The erasure of the mystical collapses the whole narrative of existence into purposelessness, reducing reality to a set of rational facts.
Children reared with such a worldview would have no hierarchy of meaning; reality was flattened such that there could be no agreed-upon higher aim, no element by which to orient oneself to a greater good or purpose. No way to balance in the chest (or the heart) the competing forces of the head’s rational intellect and the gut’s slew of instinctual appetites. Without assenting to a mysterious truth, society and its students were doomed to oscillate between the remaining portions of the soul. In traditional myth, as Lewis pointed out by way of the Tao, the cosmos is composed of two elements, masculine and feminine, yin and yang, but the higher mystery is that they always seek balance. If we don’t believe in a balance that undergirds the cosmos, we have no way to achieve it.
Nietzsche argued something similar when he proclaimed the catastrophic “death of God.” The Western mystical truth was eliminated, and humanity could no longer access meaning in this way. He saw no way to resurrect God, objectivity, absolutes, and his solution was radical: man must then be the mystical element himself and give meaning to his own life by way of becoming an Übermensch, lest he fall into despair and nihilism (or live a life in denial of the status of this reality). As with Lewis’s use of the Tao, Nietzsche broke culture into two opposite camps, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, between which the Übermensch must walk a tightrope until he achieves a transcendent balance. Therefore, the mystical must become the personal. The solution to godlessness is to fill the God-shaped hole yourself. While Christians would not agree with Nietzsche’s assessment, it works to highlight that there is no escape from the problem; even an atheist must contend with the loss of the mystical. In Campbell’s terms, Western people must live out their lives as though they are in all seriousness the hero making the journey in their own stories. All of this is due to the collapse of the mystical.
Plato, too, prophesied about the decline of the kallipolis, or the perfect city, through various stages of degradation until we reach the inverse state of tyranny. The ideal ruler would no longer be venerated because people had forgotten how to prioritize the becoming of such a person. For Plato, reason was the highest calling, but Platonic reason is much more than the contemporary sense of rationality; it was the ability to glimpse the foundations of the cosmos itself. Amazingly, Plato associated the center of reason with the image of a small child. To grasp the true nature of reality, to discover the eternal forms, requires childlike wonder. Again, the mystical element is the capstone that, once lost, brings down the edifice of civilization.
Meaninglessness and Tyranny: The Children of Sheer Rationality
Now, something about this idea of balance. Human epistemology may be divided into two general notions: the rational and the mystical, or the logical and the creative, or intellect and experience. Neuroscientists (Iain McGilchrist, for one) have told us that even our brains are divided hemispherically along these lines. Traditional cosmological and mythological explanations assign masculine and feminine natures to these opposites, respectively. What has happened in Western academia since the death of God, in fact, the problem probably began gathering steam with elements of the Reformation, is the emergence of the primacy of rationality.
We killed the mystical element, believing that we were freeing ourselves from superstitious nonsense. In so doing, we forgot that the human mind exists in a balance. The result has been the current dominance of the masculine element, rationality, while the mystical ‘feminine’ has been relegated to the margins at best. Society is reeling under this strain; many are intuitively lashing out at the perceived patriarchy. Without purpose, power dominates. The Jedi forbade attachment and helped to form Darth Vader, the dark father. The polis rejected the mystical higher forms and begat Plato’s tyrant. Many sense that tyranny is now an inevitability for the West. By denying this epistemological form, we have come to inhabit an imbalanced civilization.
The Necessity (and Inevitability) of the Mystical Feminine
Of course, the detractors of this argument will associate mysticism with the rise in interest in the New Age movement and the occult. In my hometown, once securely considered a major component of BC’s “Bible Belt,” we now have two metaphysical bookstores and no Christian ones (not long ago, there were three Christian ones). But if we take the traditional mythological structures as true, and the argument that we have prioritized ‘masculine’ thinking while denigrating ‘feminine’ intuition, this is no surprise. The feminine, in traditional belief, held the cherished and necessary place of informing the masculine. Eve discovered the talking snake. Zipporah revived Moses. Queen Esther changed the king’s mind. The woman at the well is the first to recognize Jesus as the Christ, becoming the first evangelist while the disciples still “know nothing.” Mary is visited by Gabriel before Joseph. Mary Magdalene finds Jesus’ tomb empty. The muse inspires the artist and the philosopher. Princess Leia is leading the free peoples and warring with the tyrant before Luke or Han even have a clue what life is about, and only through her relationship do they become the heroic men they were destined to be. To borrow the infamous line from the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding, “The man is the head, but the woman is the neck. And she can turn the head any way she wants.” How can the head turn if he no longer values, or even believes in, the neck? Without the mythological feminine, we are chest-less, stiff-necked people. Without the mystical, we do not rationally submit to her informing. The feminine aspect of the mystical is alive and well, but being driven from the religious experience and the annals of academia, she is seeking other avenues to express herself.
All of this to say that Christians should not fear the mystical but remember its hallowed place in our tradition. Many denominations are dwindling, all while traditions that still hold space for the mystical are seeing growth, such as Orthodoxy. The Protestant insistence on sola scriptura prioritizes a rational reading of the text alone. It has a symmetry with the secular culture’s motto of sola scientia; only the masculine epistemologies are permitted. If we are to right the societal ship, if we are to have the ship of the soul informed, we will need to reclaim the mystical. Not as an accommodation or a compromise. Not as a re-paganization or flirtation with the occult. The mystical is not contrary to a true faith, but a recognition of the universe as such. The mystical remains open to us; we need only to remember it. It is through Mary that the Second Adam comes into this world. Perhaps we should contemplate what that means.
Luke Schulz graduated from St. Stephen’s University with an MA in Theology and Culture: Classical Studies Track. His thesis explored George Lucas’ Star Wars as the unconscious myth of the fatherless West, unpacked in dialogue with Joseph Campbell, C.S. Lewis, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Plato. He works as a high school teacher in Chilliwack, BC, while exploring potential PhD possibilities. Luke is deeply interested in the intersection of faith, mythology, narrative, and society.