Radical Passion by Andrew Harvey

Author:Andrew Harvey [Harvey, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-512-4
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2012-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

Foreword to The Book of Mirdad, by Mikhail Naimy

There are, in essence, two kinds of mysticism: a mysticism that teaches the way to transcendence and union with the light alone, and an “evolutionary mysticism,” which honors the union with the Transcendent but stresses the birth of the Divine in matter that can take place as its transforming grace. History has shown us that the first kind of mysticism can coexist effortlessly with hierarchy, inequality, and injustice, because in its vision, the world is seen and known either as inevitably flawed or as an illusion, with the only refuge possible being a transcendent freedom from it.

In the second kind of mysticism, we are all challenged to go on a difficult and mysterious path of constant transformation of our entire being and action, so as to embody the Divine more and more completely, and to be agents of an evolutionary will that longs to transfigure all conditions of life on earth. This second, “evolutionary,” kind of mysticism has always been a scandal to the orthodoxies of the first kind, and while its tremendous secret (that humanity is an unfinished adventure, with all kinds of evolutionary transformations possible through its innate divine nature) has always been experienced by a few mystics in all traditions—by kabbalists in Judaism, certain secret schools of Hindu tantrism, the Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, and the Christian Orthodox mystics who underwent theosis, or “transfiguration”—its great liberating truths are still too little known.

That this should be so is especially tragic in a time like ours, when humanity is going through an unprecedented evolutionary crisis, on the outcome of which its survival depends—a crisis that can be successfully negotiated only if its true meaning is understood and if its devastating demand for a complete transformation of human nature and action on a massive scale is faced without flinching. Our evolutionary crisis is both a necessary death of all our collective fantasies of human uniqueness and our right to dominate and destroy nature, and also, simultaneously, a birth of a wholly new way of being and doing everything, far more humble and also far more powerful than anything we have yet lived or imagined, because it is aligned with divine will. The clue to knowing and understanding this lies in the pioneering testimony of the great evolutionary mystics who refused the consolations of purely transcendental mysticism and dared to plunge into the turbulent, unfolding mystery of the divine birth in matter, with history as its wild midwife.

It is in the twentieth century that evolutionary mysticism began to find its truest and most potent voice, as if in divinely inspired response to the growing barbarism and destructiveness of human action. Sri Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, and Father Bede Griffiths all proclaimed, in different terms but with one voice, that an unprecedented crisis was opening up an unprecedented opportunity, and that the growing “dark night” of our species—obvious in war, genocide, and environmental matricide—heralded potentially not extinction but transfiguration: a transfiguration by divine grace of the very terms of human nature.

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