Behold the Spirit: A Study in the Necessity of Mystical Religion

Description

In laying their main emphasis on matters of doctrine and morals, the institutional religions of the West have done little to cultivate the mystical element of religion—especially among the laity. Church services are didactic and verbal rather than contemplative, and it is hard to find any discipline of the inner life comparable to Hindu yoga or Buddhist meditation. Paradoxically, Christianity, though centered on the GodMan, Jesus, is the religion about Jesus and not of Jesus, seemingly in fear of any state of consciousness which transcends a rigid dogmatic division between the Creator and the creature, the divine and the human. Twenty-five years ago Alan Watts, then a priest of the Anglican Communion, called attention to this as a fatal weakness of Western religion, seeing in the mystical experience of union with God the essential source of spiritual vitality. At the time his work was, if anything, damned with faint praise and largely ignored in theological circles. But in view of the startling changes which have been shaking Christian thought during more recent years (in the wake of Teilhard de Chardin, Tillich, and the "death of God" theologians), as well as the surge of interest in mystical religion among the young, Behold the Spirit has now become so timely that it seemed important to reissue it with a new introduction by the author, explaining his present position vis-à-vis orthodox Christianity. ALAN WATTS, who holds both a master's degree in theology and a doctorate of divinity, is best known as an interpreter of Zen Buddhism in particular, and of Indian and Chinese philosophy in general. Standing apart, however, from sectarian membership, he has earned the reputation of being one of the most original and "unrutted" philosophers of the century. He is the author of some eighteen books on the philosophy and psychology of religion, and has been a guest lecturer at most of the principal universities in this country. He recently completed a two-year research fellowship at Harvard, in the Department of Social Relations, involving travel and study in both Europe and the Far East. "I regard [the] book as one of the best—in fact the only first-rate—book in recent years in the field of religion. It gets to the fundamental problem, it honestly sees the weaknesses of contemporary Protestantism, and it attempts to diagnose and cure the evil in the only way a cure can be effected, namely by a doctrine with content at the basic metaphysical level. It also goes further than this, recognizing contributions from Oriental religion which simply are not present in contemporary Western religion. More than this, it shows how the traditional Western doctrine of the Incarnation and the Atonement can be reconciled with and combined with the intuitive religion of the Orient, such as that of Zen Buddhism. These are exceedingly important and outstanding achievements." F. S. C. Northrop "Bebold tbe Spirit will, I think, prove to be one of the half-dozen most significant books on religion published in the twentieth century." Canon Iddings Bell