“The newly born babe of that Day” Mysticism in the Age of the Maturity of

One of the sundry classifications of mysticism suggested by Western scholars describes a mysticism of nascent religions, and a mysticism of periods of spiritual decline.1 The former is characterized by “an emotion which no one could escape, ” in a time when “all were so deeply concerned with religion that we should say: all were mystic ” (Sudbrack 13). The latter is born from “the awareness that beliefs have lost their meanings ” (Beaude 37) and from the resulting “intense tension between faith in the Ineffable and the instruments offered by religion ” (Beaude 98). In both cases mysticism seemingly characterizes souls endowed with a greater capacity to receive spiritual influences than others. In the former case, mystics are the first to perceive the earliest signs of the new spiritual springtime; in the latter case, they suffer more than the others because of the deadening harshness of the spiritual winter. The transition from the former form of mysticism, widely share