The Mystery and the World: Passion for God in Times of Unbelief

One of the most profound impacts of this change of era was most certainly on religion. And it is in the twentieth century that this new process is most clearly seen. Yet religion was not banished from the human horizon as intended by the masters of suspicion. The twentieth century is a godless century in which even the deities are ephemeral and transitory. In identifying itself with objects of consumption, it represents the height of the postmodernization process. It rescues the transcendent, but fragments it before the human being and introduces it without a face, without an identity, and without Absolutes. Religious experiences, once apparently banished by modern rationality, begin to multiply again. Individual mystical experiences will be, then, the basis for highlighting recurrent characteristics with universal import. They possess a large variety of terms that gravitate around two poles—the subjective and the objective. It can be said that the mystical experience is represented by the triangle “mystic-mystical-Mystery.” The mystical experience, in its original meaning, places itself in the interior of this triangle: in the experiential intentionality which unites the mystic as novice with the Absolute as Mystery; and in the language with which, in a second moment of recollection and reflection, the experience is named as mystical and offers itself as the object of theoretical explanations of a different nature.