Hügel's The Mystical Element of Religion features a critical but largely appreciative philosophy of mysticism. The author's "three elements of religion" are his most enduring contribution to theological thinking. The human soul, the movements of western civilization, and the phenomena of religion itself he characterized by these three elements: the historical/institutional element, the intellectual/speculative element, and the mystical/experiential element. This typology provided for him an understanding of the balance, tension, and 'friction' that exists in religious thinking and in the complexity of reality and existence. It was an organizing paradigm that remained central to his project. The effort to hold these sometimes disparate dimensions together was structurally and theologically dominant throughout his writing. The main subject of Hügel's study are the life and teaching of Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), the Italian Roman Catholic saint and mystic, admired for her work among the sick and the poor and remembered because of various writings describing both these actions and her mystical experiences. Contents: The Three Chief Forces of Western Civilization The Three Elements of Religion Catherine Fiesca Adorna's Life, up to her Conversion; and the Chief Peculiarities predominant throughout her Convert Years Catherine's Life from 1473 to 1506, and its Main Changes and Growth Catherine's Last Four Years, 1506-1510 Catherine's Doctrine Catherine's Remains and Cultus Battista Vernazza's Life Psycho-physical and Temperamental Questions The Main Literary Sources of Catherine's Conceptions Catherine's Less Ultimate This-World Doctrines The After-Life Problems and Doctrines The First Three Ultimate Questions The Two Final Problems: Mysticism and Pantheism, the Immanence of God, And Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine Back Through Asceticism, Social Religion, and the Scientific Habit of Mind, to the Mystical Element of Religion

Hügel's The Mystical Element of Religion features a critical but largely appreciative philosophy of mysticism. The author's "three elements of religion" are his most enduring contribution to theological thinking. The human soul, the movements of western civilization, and the phenomena of religion itself he characterized by these three elements: the historical/institutional element, the intellectual/speculative element, and the mystical/experiential element. This typology provided for him an understanding of the balance, tension, and 'friction' that exists in religious thinking and in the complexity of reality and existence. It was an organizing paradigm that remained central to his project. The effort to hold these sometimes disparate dimensions together was structurally and theologically dominant throughout his writing. The main subject of Hügel's study are the life and teaching of Catherine of Genoa (1447-1510), the Italian Roman Catholic saint and mystic, admired for her work among the sick and the poor and remembered because of various writings describing both these actions and her mystical experiences. Contents: The Three Chief Forces of Western Civilization The Three Elements of Religion Catherine Fiesca Adorna's Life, up to her Conversion; and the Chief Peculiarities predominant throughout her Convert Years Catherine's Life from 1473 to 1506, and its Main Changes and Growth Catherine's Last Four Years, 1506-1510 Catherine's Doctrine Catherine's Remains and Cultus Battista Vernazza's Life Psycho-physical and Temperamental Questions The Main Literary Sources of Catherine's Conceptions Catherine's Less Ultimate This-World Doctrines The After-Life Problems and Doctrines The First Three Ultimate Questions The Two Final Problems: Mysticism and Pantheism, the Immanence of God, And Spiritual Personality, Human and Divine Back Through Asceticism, Social Religion, and the Scientific Habit of Mind, to the Mystical Element of Religion

Reproduction of the original: The Mystical Element of Religion by Baron Friedrich von Hugel

Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind, and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning, Logic, Abstraction,—all that appears as the necessary instrument and expression of the Universal and Abiding,—does not move or win the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and evanescent. Reasoning appears but capable, at best, of co-ordinating, unifying, explaining the material furnished to it by experience of all kinds; at worst, of explaining it away; at best, of stimulating the purveyance of a fresh supply of such experience; at worst, of stopping such purveyance as much as may be. And yet the Reasoning would appear to be the transferable part in the process, but not to move; and the experience alone to have the moving power, but not to be transmissible.