“A major new
Vatican
document on the New Age movement has warned that a
number of Catholic retreat places, seminaries and religious formation houses
are dabbling in New Age spirituality which is incompatible with Christian
doctrine.” Thus begins a review from The
London Tablet, a Roman Catholic weekly, of Jesus Christ the Bearer of the Water of Life – A Christian Reflection
on the “New Age”, an 88-page “provisional” report published
February 2 this year.
New Age spirituality
is not foreign to the Orthodox. From its beginnings, the Church has
continually had to deal with gnostic religious traditions.
Some Orthodox retreat houses and camp facilities must rent their
space to a wide variety of groups both in and outside the Church, simply to
keep their doors open. In those situations, they see some of the same “dabbling”
described in the Tablet’s review.
Retreat
and camp facilities aside, our own faithful — many of whom are inactive
cradle Orthodox — have been migrating away from the Faith toward New Age
thought and religiosity. Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (+1891), founder of
the Theosophical Society which is credited with starting the New Age Movement
in 1875, is only one of many Orthodox Christians who have left the Church to
seek the “mystical path.” The message of this new document should be of
interest to Orthodox Christians as well as Roman Catholics.
In presenting the
document, Cardinal Paul Poupard, president of the Pontifical Council for
Culture, said, “The New
Age phenomenon, along with many other new religious movements, is one of the
most urgent challenges for the Christian faith.”
“People feel the Christian religion no longer offers them — or
perhaps never gave them — something they really need,” says the
report. “The search which often leads people to the New Age is a genuine
yearning: for a deeper spirituality, for something which will touch their
hearts, and for a way of making sense of a confusing and often alienating
world” (1.5). The report warns of the strong appeal of New Age thought and
practice, even for Christians: “When the understanding of the content of
Christian faith is weak, some mistakenly hold that the Christian religion does
not inspire a profound spirituality and so they seek elsewhere” (1.5).
In response to this
assertion, the document aims to explain how the New Age movement differs from
the Christian faith. Although it cautions its readers about New Age
spirituality, it does not offer broad prohibitions. Instead, it seeks to
encourage further study and offer means of discernment to those looking for a
deeper spirituality.
If such a
document were to be written by a commission of Eastern Orthodox
Christians, the responses to some of the New Age assertions would be presented
very differently. For example, in the Christian East we view the whole
cosmos as a theophany; the material realm can be an image of the Creator Who
somehow dwells within .
This concept of panentheism (not pantheism) encourages us to see that
all things are made
through the Logos and bear His image. In
addition, the sacramentality of matter inherent in the view of St. Maximus the
Confessor is very much in opposition to the Western Christian dichotomization
between spirit and matter. Nonetheless, despite the specific instances
where we and Roman Catholics might evaluate the New Age from different
perspectives, the text of Jesus Christ
the Bearer of the Water of Life can easily apply to all Christians, East
and West.”
The term “New Age” originates with the belief in a cosmic turning
point long predicted by astrologers: The second millennium, the Age of Pisces
(the 2000-year Christian age of the fish —icthys)
is drawing to a close, moving from one mansion sign of the zodiac to the next.
This leads to the dawning of the third millennium, a new Age of
Aquarius (the water bearer).
With
this in mind, the
Vatican
report takes its title from the encounter between the Savior and St. Photini,
the Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s Well (John 4). Jesus Christ urges her (and by
extension all mankind) to seek after Him: the Way the Truth and the Life. The
Lord Jesus — not the zodiac’s water bearer — is the One Who inaugurated
the New Aeon of the Kingdom of God and Who bestows Living Water.
The
Vatican
document states that many of today’s contemporary
spiritual and religious practices may be grouped under the topic of “New
Age.” Thus, it invites its readers “to take account of the way that
New Age religiosity addresses the spiritual hunger of contemporary men and
women” (Foreword). Much of what the New Age offers speaks to the
yearning of many — “If the Church is not to be
accused of being deaf to people's longings, her members need . . . to root
themselves ever more firmly in the fundamentals of their faith, and to
understand the often-silent cry in people's hearts, which leads them elsewhere
if they are not satisfied by the Church” (1.5). The document says that there
is a call in all of this to draw nearer to the Savior, since He is the
authentic way to true joy.
The document contrasts many aspects of New Age spirituality, which it
calls “a kind of spiritual narcissism or pseudo-mysticism” (3.2), with
Christian “counterparts”:
-
New Age thought frequently holds that God is an
impersonal energy or force, found deep within oneself and also deep within
the whole cosmos. Christians, on the other hand, know,
experience and love God as a transcendent trinity of Divine Persons. God, Who
created the cosmos, “dwells in unapproachable light, [and] wants to
communicate His own divine life” to His people so as to enter into
relationship with Him: a communion of Love (4).
-
New Age thought considers
Jesus one teacher — or esoteric initiate or avatar — among many who
could be considered to be christs. Christians
know Him as the incarnate God, “the son of Mary and the only Son of God,
true man and true God, the full revelation of divine truth, unique Saviour
of the world” (4).
-
New Age teaches that salvation (or
enlightenment) is do-it-yourself self-fulfilment, self-realization, self-redemption.
Christians believe that salvation is a free gift from God. It “depends
upon our participation in the passion, death and resurrection of Christ
and on a direct personal relationship with God rather than on any
technique” (4).
-
New Age thinkers believe
that prayer is a turning within oneself (or else a simple emptying of the
mind) which “constitutes an essentially human enterprise on the part of
the person who seeks to rise towards divinity by his or her own efforts”
(3.4) Christian prayer, on the other hand, together with meditation and
contemplation, has a double orientation: it involves introspection, but it
is also a means of loving dialogue and mystical union with God. It “leads
to an increasingly complete surrender to God’s will, whereby we are
invited to a deep, genuine solidarity with our brothers and sisters”
(3.4).
Christians
acknowledge the reality of sin and its effects (sickness, sorrow, suffering
and death). Each person is called “to share in that suffering through which
the redemption was accomplished . . . . that
suffering through which all human suffering has been redeemed” (40). In New
Age thought all these are minimized as “bad karma,” if not simply
dismissed altogether.
The document encourages Christians to investigate the riches of their
own tradition. When they do so, they are sometimes surprised at what they
find.
Our own Christian
mystical tradition shows that searching within provides much more depth and
significance than can be found “outside.” There is probably nothing more
noteworthy about Eastern Orthodox spirituality than the ancient patristic
concept of theosis. Although it is
found within the Western Christian mystical tradition, its roots lie in the
Christian East. The water of life is offered to us by the very Word Himself in
the dynamic interchange: the enfleshment of the Word of God and the en-Wordment
of the flesh of humankind.
Quoting from the Preface to Book 4 of St. Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses, the document states that the Savior, “through
His transcendent love, become what we are, that He might bring us to be even
what He is Himself.” Here theosis,
the Christian understanding of divinization, comes about not through our own
efforts alone, “but with the assistance of God's grace working in and
through us. . . . It unfolds as an introduction into the life of the Trinity,
a perfect case of distinction at the heart of unity; it is synergy rather than
fusion. . . . It involves being transformed in our soul
and in our body by participation in the sacramental life of the Church”
(3.5).
The document concludes with the
suggestion of a number of practical steps. They are as applicable to Roman
Catholics as they are to Orthodox Christians. Christian mystical spirituality
is both contemplative and apostolic. The two “ways” are inter-dependent.
Bearing this in mind, the document offers a challenge.
It
points out that the movement’s adherents compare traditional religions to a
cathedral and the New Age to a worldwide fair. Taking the image at its face
value, it’s now time for Christians to take the cathedral’s message to the
people at the fair. In fact, over the past decade many formerly New Age
communities, while wandering along their mystical pathway, have come upon the
Christian East. With varying degrees of thoroughness they have shed
their Aquarian orientation for the Savior’s gifts of the tree and crown of
life, hidden manna, white
stone, new name, white garments and synthronos (Apoc. 2-3) within the Orthodox
Church. As an example, see the book entitled: The Odyssey of a New Religion: The Holy Order
of MANS from New Age to Orthodoxy by Philip Charles Lucas, associate
professor of religious studies at
Stetson
University
in
DeLand
,
Florida
(Indiana University Press; (April 1995), ISBN: 0253336120).”
“Christians need not, indeed, must not wait for an
invitation to bring the message of the Good News of Jesus Christ to those who
are looking for the answers to their questions, for spiritual food that
satisfies, for living water” (6.2).
The key is not in emphasizing the inadequacy of other approaches, but
instead to revisit the sources of our own faith, to offer “a good sound
presentation of the Christian message.” We may need to recover the symbolism
and artistic traditions of the Christian culture. In dialogue with people
attracted to the new age, Christians must appeal to what touches the emotions
and symbolic language.
We must begin with the Scriptures, the report says, but “most
of all, coming to meet the Lord Jesus in prayer and in the sacraments, which
are precisely the moments when our ordinary life is hallowed, is the surest
way of making sense of the whole Christian message” (6.2).
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