CS Lewis and Mysticism

Quoting David Downing in the video. 

Lewis said that he thought a lot of Eastern mysticism probably pointed to valid experiences. Often Christianity takes truths from other religions and clarifies them and perfects them and you need the trellis of a really solid theology upon which to build mystical encounters and the two main things that includes are the Trinity and the Incarnation.

 

They spend a bit of time at the beginning discussing what mysticism does and does not mean, and I think wisely.  It does not mean "bordering on the occult,"or an image of an emaciated friar in a cell somewhere seeing this holy holograph of a saint, or of Jesus.  Once again this visionary mysticism isn't really the key to Christian mysticism. Lewis said it's the direct experience of God, as concrete as a taste or a color. I thought that useful because I do tend to be suspicious of mysticism and see it as peering over the edge of a cliff that leads to the occult at the bottom, or that ascetic who lives such an attenuated life that he cannot help but have one foot in the next world, having so little contact with this one.  

Lewis's imagery - not only in his fiction but in the many examples he keeps throwing into his potential dry nonfiction logic - is quite opposite.  It is robust, sensuous, almost frighteningly more real than our usual lives, much as Jesus went through walls in the Acts of the Apostles not because he was insubstantial like a ghost who could drift through, but because he was so much more substantial after his resurrection that it is our world, our walls, that are insubstantial in comparison.

Another fun quote:

When Catholics go astray their religion is like all of the religions. It's about priesthoods and talismans and magic formulas. But when Protestants go astray their religion is like no religion at all. It just becomes ethical platitudes.

I thought that a pretty sharp observation.