Monday, October 25, 2004
CONFERENCE ON NEW AGE AND CHRISTIAN SPIRITUALITY
The conference was reported in The Chesterton Review February/May 2000. A synopsis of the report can be read at the Vatican website. Stratford Caldecott's comments are pertinent to my recent blogs:
Stratford Caldecott situates his talk on “The Transcendental Disunity of Religions” at a moment of cultural decline, which, he says, challenges us to be discerning. There have always been “attempts to assimilate Christianity to one or other model of world religions” (p. 117). At the moment, there is the United Religions, which could possibly include among its aims “a bland common-factor wisdom”, and not really the “uniqueness of each religion” mentioned in the UR Draft Charter. This is portrayed as a rather crude effort in assimilation, compared with the ideas of Charles Upton, who claims his is not an attempt to create a “world fusion spirituality” or a common doctrine, but “true ecumenism” which is “the outer expression of the ‘esoteric ecumenism’ of the Transcendent Unity of Religions”. The latter term is consciously borrowed from the works of the late Frithjof Schuon. He is not encouraging syncretism or papering over the cracks, but unity in a war where the enemy is an alliance between “scientism, magical materialism, idolatry of the psyche and postmodern nihilism” (p. 122). Upton’s point of departure is the metaphysics of the Traditionalists, who include Schuon, René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. This group influenced Eric Gill, Thomas Merton and T.S. Eliot, and contemporary writers such as Alan Watts and Ken Wilber. Their realism, in the strict philosophical sense, may well be a point of dialogue with Catholic tradition. The point of difference is the seriousness with which Christianity has always taken the physical Incarnation, the scandalous paradox that makes Jesus more than any prophet, more than any avatar. We are not divine by nature, but are introduced into divinity by grace. For Christians, relationship with the divine is not one of absorption, as is the case in New Age and Asian religions; it is one of love, which always essentially involves distinction. Traditionalists effectively deny this unique characteristic of Christianity, while claiming to respect religions in all their diversity. Caldecott compares the present state of Christianity to that of believers at the end of the Roman Empire; now, as then, it is the mystery religions which attract, and all around is “a Gnosticism that promises secret initiations without humility” (p. 129). Christianity cannot be assimilated because Christ cannot be assimilated; in Him “God has done something new and different. Yet at the same time, aesthetics, mythology, psychology, and metaphysics are not left behind. I believe it is a task of the new millennium to reintegrate these with Christianity” (p. 132).
Caldecott's paper can be read in full here.
