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New Age Spiritualities: How are we to Talk of God?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Richard Woods OP
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Two autobiographical accounts by American Jesuit priests of their New Age involvement have gained considerable attention recently—David Toolan’s Facing West from California’s Shores: A Jesuit’s Journey into New Age Consciousness published in 1987, and Fr. Mitch Pacwa’s Catholics and the New Age, published last year and already reprinted.

David Toolan does not, so far as I am aware, attempt to define the New Age movement. But his encounters reveal this ‘epistemological revolution’ to be an amalgam of Asian mysticism, modem physics, and transpersonal psychologies. Its major proponents are the Esalen Institute, Jean Houston’s ‘Ritual Theater,’ and a host of physicists, psychologists, and naturalists, including Ernest Becker, Stanislaus Grof, Loren Eisley, David Bohm, and Ilya Prigogine, among others.

According to Pacwa’s descriptive (and to my way of thinking very limited) definition, the New Age Movement ‘is a loosely structured, eclectic movement based on experiences of monism that lead people to believe in pantheism, with a tendency to hold millennarian views of history’ (p. 13). (No one, of course, with the possible exception of some professional philosophers, experiences monism or believes in pantheism or even holds millennarian views of history. What Pacwa means is that some people have experiences that he considers monistic rather than dualistic, or entertain ideas about God that he considers insufficiently distinct from ideas about the world, and who tend to think the world might end soon.)

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 74 , Issue 870 , April 1993 , pp. 176 - 191
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 (New York: Crossroad 1987.)

2 Pacwa, Mitch SJ, Catholics and the New Age, (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1992.)Google Scholar

3 ‘Soul of a New Age,’Omni, October, 1987.

4 For confirmation, one need only consult, for instance, the table of contents a recent anthology, The Seeker's Guide: A New Age Resource Book edited by Button, John and Bloom, William, with a foreword by Trevelyan, George Sir (London: Harper Collins, 1992)Google Scholar.

5 Ed. Michael Downey, (liturgical Press, 1993.)

6 Portions of the following section have been adapted from my book, Christian Spirituality: God's Presence through the Ages (Chicago: Thomas More Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

7 On eschatological expectations of the period and later occurrences, see Chamberlain, E. R., Antichrist and the Millennium (New York: Saturday Review Press/E. P. Dutton, 1975)Google Scholar. On eschatoloy in general, see Charles, R.H., Eschalology [1898‐99] (New York: Schocken, 1963)Google Scholar, I. A. Robinson, T., In the End, God (New York: Harper and Row, 1968)Google Scholar, Schillebeeckx, Edward and Willems, Boniface, eds., The Problem of Eschalology (New York: Paulist Press, 1969Google Scholar [Concilium 41]), Russell, D. S., Apocalyptic, Ancient and Modern (London: SCM Press, 1978)Google Scholar, and Hayes, Zachary O.F.M., Visions of a Future: A Study of Christian Eschatology (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1989)Google Scholar and his What are They Saying about the End of the World? (New York: Paulist Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

8 Old Testament and apocryphal influences include Dan 7:13–14, Is. 27:13, the Book of Enoch, and 2 Esdras. Possible New Testament sources include Mt 24: 29–30, Mk 13: 26–27, Lk 21: 25–27, 1 Thess 14–17, 2 Pet 3: 8–13, and Jude 14–16.

9 See McGinn, Bernard, trans., Apocalyptic Spirituality: Treatises and Letters of Lactanlius, Adso of Montier‐en‐Der, Joachim of Fiore, the Franciscan Spirituals, Savonarola (New York: Paulist Press, 1979)Google Scholar. For a brief account of Joachism and subsequent millennial beliefs, see Chamberlain, E. R., Antichrist and the Millennnium (New York: Saturday Review Press/E.P. Dutton, 1975Google Scholar. Cf. also Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

10 See Whitson, Robley Edward, ed., The Shakers: Two Centuries of Spiritual Reflection (New York: Paulist Press, 1983)Google Scholar and Andrews, Edward, The People Called Shakers: a Search for the Perfect Society (New York: 1963)Google Scholar.

11 See in particular Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans, by Powell, Robert (Amity, NY: Amity House, 1985)Google Scholar.

12 For an important overview of Teilhard's spirituality, see King, Thomas M. SJ, Teilhard de Chardin (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1988)Google Scholar, and King, Ursula, Towards a New Mysticism: Teilhard de Chardin and Eastern Religions (New York: Seabury Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

13 See Surhawk, , Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

14 Fowler, James W. Becoming Adult, Becoming Christian: Adult Development and Christian Faith, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984)Google Scholar; Fowler, James W., Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981)Google Scholar; Parks, Sharon, The Critical Years: The Young Adult Search for a Faith to Live By, (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986)Google Scholar.

15 Pacwa, Catholics and the New Age p. 63.

16 See also Pope St. Leo the Great: For every believer regenerated in Christ … is reckoned to be of the stock, not of his earthly father, but of Christ, who became Son of Man precisely that men could become sons of God …”(Sermon 6 in Nativitae Domini 2–3, 5. PL 54, 213–16).

17 Duane, Diane, The Wounded Sky, (Boston: Gregg Press, 1983, p. 87Google Scholar.)