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But… your history is wrong. Pre-Tridentine Catholicism was all about popular piety, thé early Protestants tended to disapprove of the forms it took(like rosaries, images, Eucharistic adoration, etc). Pre-Tridentine Catholicism also did not have the rigorous policing of spiritual practices that later became associated with it, that’s more a feature of the reformation. Contemporary Catholic mysticism and lay piety is mostly following devotions associated with st Dominic and st Francis, both creatures of the high Middle Ages. It’s also false to say that the counterreformation suppressed lay mystical devotion and contemplative prayer, when st ignatius and st Francis de sales were leading figures.
It’s also false to paint contemporary American Protestantism as not being robustly supernatural; there are some mega churches that are social clubs, or prosperity gospel, or otherwise not really oriented around spirituality, but there are others that are Pentecostal. I disagree with the latter, but it’s clearly spiritual in orientation. Early Protestantism tended to develop more spiritual/mystical branches within a few generations of the split, as well(Methodists and pietists being prominent examples)- often just after the memory of catholic popular piety was gone- which is evidence against your thesis that early Protestantism was more mystical as a big selling point.
This is wonderful! Yeah part of why I posted this is I wanted to be corrected. So why do you think contemplation and mysticism has become so de-emphasized in Western Christianity?
How are you using the word mysticism here? I don’t think that personal devotion has been deëmphasized in Western Christianity. But mysticism proper was never as central to the Western church as it is to Eastern Orthodoxy today.
I don’t think I fully understand how you are drawing up your categories, so I apologize if this is a crude way of putting it. But if you are asking, “When did you guys stop being Palamist?”, the answer is that we never were.
Edit: To explain from another angle for the sake of clarity: I am treating mystical and supernatural as overlapping categories, not as synonyms.
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Secular humanism.
Tracing Christianity from the reformation through the enlightenment, all the way to Vatican 2, you see a lot of theological "innovations" that reinterpret divine revelation as allegory instead of literal fact. Faith, including theological virtues, becomes more of an elaborate world-building around classic virtue ethics; be honest, be kind, don't lie, etc. etc.
This kind of thinking gets a lot of traction because it demands less of the faithful. It's a lot easier to feel like you're a good person (and also a good Christian) if life is more about trying your best to be a "good person" and isn't full of pesky zero-or-one rules for sin.
Layer on top of that that secular humanism explicitly rejects the supernatural which is inextricable from, at least from the Catholic tradition, the doctrine of faith:
To your original post, the only thing I have to add that others haven't done a better job of commenting on is in regards to this part:
Problems arise when people on the left, or, anyone, really, resists admitting that their experiential states, following of the heart etc. are subjective and not objective truths. "Living your truth" is a nonsense statement. Truth is one thing, it's objective. Your personal experience is absolutely your own, but there are objective facts embedded within it; you're a man or you're a woman, you are old or you are young and so forth.
I'm not an expert on the Catholic church's responses to mysticism around the reformation, but it would seem to me that's always going to be a sensitive subject. If anyone can just run around saying they had a vision of Christ or The Virgin Mary and we're all expected to take it at face value, then we've lost the plot, haven't we? This is exactly, literally, exactly! what's going on in the culture war at present.
Bothall sides are fighting over facts, which isn't necessarily new, but at least one major faction (wokes / progressives) is, while fighting over facts, also rejecting the premise of objective truth in the first place. Which means they're fighting for ..... ?More options
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General decline in religiosity. Religious Catholics(of any tribal affiliation) are just as into adoration and contemplation as they’ve ever been. There are just fewer.
Protestant churches have historically followed an oscillation where a decline in the spiritual content is resolved by a high-spiritualist branching off of it, leaving a far less supernatural original denomination which would have less interest in mysticism tautologically. The mainline->evangelical->pentecostal migrations are a visible example in our own lifetimes; in the past, when social trends were slower, Methodists and pietists, thé great awakening, and the Victorian revival movement were major waves happening in rapid succession. The whole thing is that Protestantism is not a religion that values tradition overmuch, so the new spiritual movement that branches off tends to be ‘new’ enough to drop old timey spiritual practices that were falling out of favor in the original denomination. Megachurchianity of the generic evangelical sort happens to be on the short end of the stick right now.
Vatican II threw traditional piety into a ditch at the time it could be least afforded; fortunately St John Paul II rescued most of the practices in danger of being forgotten, but the fragmentation and refugia remains; modern American commentators(like most of this forum) tend to forget how heavily Catholic American religiosity would have been in the 50’s, and the Catholic Church was not shy about using its cultural power to push basic Christianity, even in a generic way. In non-American locales Catholicism often had much smaller or fewer fragments but I don’t know as much about them. Nevertheless the sickness afflicting ‘the giant’(over 50% of global Christianity is Catholic- and for western Christianity specifically, it’s more like 75-80%) simply makes it harder to just have religious Christianity. WELS members have told me this, as well, so it isn’t 100% due to Catholic bias.
Christian moral beliefs are a bigger ask of a bigger percentage of the population than they once were; thé people who want mysticism without the guilt turn to non-Christian mysticism, partly due to relentless campaigning in favor of liberal values by the media. This in turn makes other things to fill the god shaped hole more common etc.
Yup. It definitely tripped me out when, several years ago, my Dad told me about Fulton Sheen's radio show and how you could find a national broadcast of the rosary at least once a week.
I have also heard anecdotes that some of the midwest catholic strongholds (Cincinnati in particular) had things like fish in public schools on Fridays in Lent. Imagine the blowup that would have today.
In the UK, fish in school (including explicitly C of E schools) and workplace canteens on Friday had been the default since well before I was born, and I am reasonably sure that it became the default back when anti-Catholicism was still part of the national identity. I grew up associating it with Christianity generally, not Catholicism.
Of course, the traditional English fish and chips is not exactly an abstemious meal - and indeed the English Catholic hierarchy has warned the faithful that eating a huge plateful of fish and chips defeats the purpose of the Friday fast. I remember playing bridge on Friday evening against a man who was some kind of Catholic lay minister, and as we stuffed ourselves with fish he explained that his parish was pushing the idea of "eat what you want on Friday, but only 2/3 as much as you normally would".
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Mayor Adams brought meatless Fridays to NYC schools, and the public response was making fun of his veganism.
It's actually interesting to note- most people think of 'Cafeteria Catholic' as a term originating as a metaphor for 'you say yes to this, I'll pass on that, like at a cafeteria serving line'. But that's a backronism(it is too a word, I just invented it); the original meaning was someone who would pick fish on Fridays at the cafeteria but not follow Catholic moral laws he found inconvenient.
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