When the Mysteries Are Diminished

[boccaderlupo]

By chance I had been reading Diarmaid MacCullough's history of The Reformation when I came across a recent post by ecosophia on Protestantism that spurred some reflection, as I have family members who are from that tradition.

The major question, aside from its iconoclasm, that the Protestant Reformation raised for the old Church was about the Eucharist. Regardless of the technical approaches one takes, the main issue, to me, is the questioning itself. Once doubt has been raised about a mystery, any participants who are rocked by such doubts cannot experience it in the same way; that is, you gotta have faith. The reality of the mystery itself, and its efficacy, was directly undermined.

This prompted me to ponder: to what extent did this spiritual attack on the Eucharist create space for other spirits to advance their agendas? A case could perhaps be made, then, that such events as the Enlightenment (advanced by such groups as the Freemasons, et al [side note: the previous Pope Leo was no fan]) and the rise of, say, the National Socialist German Workers party and the Italian fascist party (and their alignments with a renascent heathenry and paganism, respectively) could be traced back, spiritually speaking, to the abandonment of the mysteries and their general deprecation over the centuries.

Comments

[neptunesdolphins]

That is a good question - how did the spiritual attack on the Eucharist open space for other spirits? One thing is that in America, all sorts of splinting happened to recapture mystery in Protestantism. I am thinking of Pentecostals.

[boccaderlupo]

Indeed! I think it could be argued that America itself, insofar as it has a sort of basis in Freemasonry, was in part a product of this gradual decoupling from the Christian mysteries over the centuries.