Is mysticism compatible with Christianity? With so rich a mystical tradition as that possessed by the Catholic Church, this might seem a superfluous question to ask. But the term ‘mysticism’ which for Catholics has normally meant a direct apprehension of God, initiated by God and leading to the closest union of the soul with God, has nowadays been called upon to cover a variety of states of soul which many Catholics would not consider to be mystical at all since there is no direct confrontation of person with Person, no union between the two poles and no love.

Be this as it may, I propose for the purposes of this article to include two well-known types of preternatural experience as ‘mystical’ because, in non-Catholic circles, they are usually considered to be so, and because the characteristic of each is that the ‘mystic feels himself to be transplanted beyond time and space into an eternal ‘now’ in which death can have no relevance and man's natural condition is seen to be one of certain immortality. This type of experience can be ‘extroverted', that is, the soul feels itself to be merged in the undying life of all things; or it can be ‘introverted', in which case the soul plunges into its own deepest essence from which all that is phenomenal, transient, and conditioned, falls away and it sees itself as unfractionably one and beyond all the dualities of worldly life.