Friday, September 15, 2017

New Age Spirituality is a Response to Total Relativism


[New Age] is...a consciously antirationalist response to the experience that "everything is relative"...The way out of the dilemma of relativism is now sought, not in a new encounter of the "I" with the "Thou" or the "We", but in overcoming subjective consciousness, in a re-entry into the dance of the cosmos through ecstasy. As in the case of Gnosis in the ancient world, this way believes itself to be fully in tune with all the teachings and the claims of science, making use of scientific knowledge of every kind (biology, psychology, sociology, physics). At the same time, however, it offers against this background a completely antirationalist pattern of religion, a modern "mysticism": the absolute is, not something to be believed in, but something to be experienced. God is not a person distinct from the world; rather, he is the spiritual energy that is at work throughout the universe. Religion means bringing my self into tune with the cosmic whole, the transcending of all divisions..."That self, which hitherto wished to subject everything to itself, now wants to dissolve itself in 'the whole." Objectifying reason, New Age thinking tells us, closes our way to the mystery of reality; existing as the self shuts us out from the fullness of cosmic reality; it destroys the harmony of the whole and is the real reason for our being unredeemed. Redemption lies in breaking down the limits of the self, in plunging into the fullness of life and all that is living, in going back home to the universe. Ecstasy is being sought for, the intoxication of infinity, which can happen to people en masse in ecstatic music, in rhythm, in dance, in a mad whirl of lights and darkness. Here it is not merely the modern way of domination by the self that is renounced and abolished; here, man--in order to be free--must let himself be abolished. The gods are returning. They have become more credible than God. Aboriginal rites must be renewed in which the self is initiated into the mysteries of the universe and freed from its own self.
There are many reasons for the renewal of pre-Christian religions and cults that is being widely undertaken today. If there is no truth shared by everyone, a truth that is valid simply because it is true, then Christianity is merely a foreign import, a form of spiritual imperialism, which needs to be shaken off just as much as political imperialism. If what takes place in the sacraments is not the encounter with the one living God of all men, then they are empty rituals that mean nothing and give us nothing and, at best, allow us to sense the numinous element that is actively present in all religions. It then seems to make better sense to seek after what was originally our own than to permit alien and antiquated things to be imposed on us. But above all, if the "rational intoxication" of the Christian mystery cannot make us intoxicated with God, then we just have to conjure up the real, concrete intoxication of effective ecstasies, the passionate power of which catches us up and turns us, at least for a moment, into gods, helps us for a moment to sense the pleasure of infinity and to forget the misery of finite existence. The more the pointlessness of political absolutisms becomes obvious, the more powerful will be the attraction of irrationalism, the renunciation of everyday reality.
Take from Truth and Tolerance, Joseph Ratzinger, San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003, 126-129, the original article being "Relativism: The Central Problem for Faith Today" Address to the Presidents of the Doctrinal Commissions of the Bishops' Conferences of Latin America, Guadalajara, Mexico, May 1996, 115-137 in the present volume.

[T]here is an awakening of young people today, who are asking passionately about God, ready to let their life be determined totally and fundamentally by him. There is a greater generosity on the part of young people, who are not satisfied with vague feelings and half-hearted decisions but who seek unconditional obedience to the truth. Besides this, however, there is a widespread, rather vague tendency that one could call a yearning for spirituality and for religious experience. It would be wrong to dismiss this, but it would also be inappropriate to see in it the beginning of a new turning to the Christian faith. For this yearning often arises from a disappointment at the shortcomings of the technological world; it contains nostalgic elements and above all a deep skepticism with regard to man's vocation to truth. Truth seems to be discredited in history by the intolerance of those who fancied themselves in secure possession of it. Besides this, the experience of the limitations of science and the weakness of ideologies provokes skepticism rather than encourages the search for truth. Thus truth tends to be replaced by "values" about which one can seek at least a partial agreement. But such a selection remains questionable if the criterion of truth is inaccessible. But above all, religion, if it is born of skepticism and disappointment at the boundaries of knowledge, necessarily becomes the domain of the irrational. It remains in the sphere of the nonbinding and easily turns into a narcotic. New mythologies are formed, as we see with particular clarity in the many-faceted phenomenon that is offered up for sale under the collective name "New Age". The parallels to the gnosis of the ancient world are striking: in both, abstruse themes of mythology are linked to the ambitious claim to possess the key of knowledge and to have found an ell-embracing interpretation of reality, in which the mysteries of the universe are uncovered and knowledge becomes redemption. The living God sinks down into the spiritual depths of existence in which man bathes and ultimately is dissolved in order to become on with the All out of which he has come. Karl Barth's observation that religion can become a kind of self-satisfying process that does not lead to God, but rather confirms man in himself and closes him against God, takes on a new contemporary relevance.
Ratzinger, Turning Point for Europe? San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994, 100-102. The original article being a lecture given at La Sapienza University in Rome, 1990 (also in Rieti, 1989, and Toledo, 1990).

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