Dionysian Mysticism and Deification (REVIEW ESSAY)

Vatican II is often described as a watershed in the Roman Catholic Church.

(Disclosure: I come from a Roman Catholic background. However, for many years now, I have not been a practicing Catholic. Today I would describe myself as a theistic humanist, as distinct from a secular humanist.)

DIONYSIAN MYSTICISM AND JUNG

Approximately 50 years after Vatican II, the Catholic University of America Press published Bernhard Blankenhorn's new book MYSTERY OF UNION WITH GOD: DIONYSIAN MYSTICISM IN ALBERT THE GREAT AND THOMAS AQUINAS (2015).

Even though the multi-national Thomistic Revival was still alive and well during my undergraduate education, as it had been for decades, I cannot imagine that any Dominican theologian or other Roman Catholic author would have ever dared to use the term "Dionysian," as Blankenhorn does, to describe the psycho-spiritual process involved in working through the mystery of union with God.

Dionysian mysticism involves profound mystical experiences. For Example, St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder of the Jesuit religious order in the Roman Catholic Church, had profound mystical experiences. He eventually wrote up a guide-book known as the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES, based on so-called spiritual exercises that worked for him. Spiritual exercises are forms of meditation and contemplation involving the imagination. The book titled the SPIRITUAL EXERCISES contains detailed instructions about how to proceed to engage one's imagination in meditation and contemplation. However, there is no guarantee that engaging in meditation and contemplation will result in one's having profound mystical experiences, as St. Ignatius Loyola did. In other words, Dionysian mysticism is not a frequent experience.

Concerning St. Ignatius Loyola, see W. W. Meissner's book IGNATIUS OF LOYOLA: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF A SAINT (Yale University Press, 1992).

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