| Title | : | Lost Christiantiy |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1585422533 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781585422531 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1980 |
Lost Christiantiy Reviews
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‘Suddenly I remembered I had forgotten to remember myself...’
This thought, written by a reviewer of Needleman’s book on a Christian blogspot says it all!
It means that we Must put our INNER SELF into our faith. No way around it.
In our speed, and in the constant bombardment of our media we have forgotten to care for our souls.
Our soul is like a garden. It needs weeding. It needs to be examined carefully for evidences of neglect, or too much extroverted sunlight and not enough inner strength. It’s a sacred space for us.
It’s our only ticket to a life of renewed love and expanded awareness.
Lose it - and we die inside!
The ads constantly remind us of our needs. Do they remind us that our souls are turning grey and shrivelling up for lack of soul food?
No. WE have to do that. We are our OWN gardeners!
But our problem is we always FORGET that fateful moment when we abandoned the Stairway to Heaven.
T.S. Eliot reminds us that we abandoned it because that stairway had become Dark and Treacherous:
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jagged, like an old man’s mouth drivelling, beyond repair,
Or the toothed gullet of aged shark.
Because:
In short, we were Afraid.
Yes, ain’t it the truth? We’re ALL afraid of our Shadow. But there is a Better Way to get past this Beast in the Dark Wood -
Inner Faith.
“I suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself...”
With Faith we can begin the dark descent to the shadowland we were always afraid of. The Faith of the Hidden Way! The Via Obscura...
If we’re up to it, we can finally set out like John of the Cross ‘on a dark night, our house being all at rest, unobserved by all...’
And this book can guide you on that hidden dark path, for its characters have successfully traversed the abyss!
Needleman’s Father Vincent, for example, is one who always remembers his inner spirit, even in the unlikeliest places.
He is also always quite ready to share his intensely mystical Inner Life, visions and insights - even though he’s just a regular guy who watches Monday Night Football.
Father Sylvain is another patient, Living Soul that Needleman encounters, leaving him with copious and vividly detailed notes on his own inner voyage.
An inner voyage that has penetrated into the radiant light of the soul - a light which the world is all too anxious to bury under a heap of rags, as the French symboliste Stéphane Mallarme so aptly points out.
Even a sophisticated Coptic Egyptian prelate radiates this intense inner spirit.
Needleman - an agnostic - is not sure, himself. And his type of ‘objective’ writing may transmit a sense of uncertainty to you.
Don’t let it.
For he sure feels the unmistakable VIBES of Faith in these people!
Something Lost to the modern world, except in rare instances.
And his inference is - if these radiant lives indicate a nascent pattern - any of us can always remember who WE really are.
All it takes is a little simple faith.
Socrates once said it just takes long, attentive inner Recollection - and in so saying, antedated the rule of the great monastic orders, and these kindly teachers who tell us their stories here.
Just remembering, as Needleman’s subjects would say, to remember ourSELVES...
As we are, and will be soon, in God. -
This book challenges the reader to re-think almost everything they understand about "lost" Christianity. Needleman does not present another work on Gnosticism, Christian contemplation, esoteric teachings, or hidden gospels; instead he indicates that a change of heart (an almost ontological change, and not merely one in thought and emotion) is necessary for even the most rudimentary Christian teachings to take root and become REAL in a person's lived experience.
Professor Needleman's writing is superb, with insightful (DEEPLY insightful) comments abounding (in some places, I flagged one or two sentences per paragraph, which is rare). The only "drawback" is that it is up to the reader to find the spiritual guidance necessary to maintain the Question, to develop the unity of purpose needed to realize the Christian gospel (or any other wisdom teachings, for that matter). At least I have a clearer notion of what I am seeking and of what I need to make my Buddhist and Christian spiritual practices REAL.
I am definitely going to reread this book. Highly, highly recommended. -
Needleman presses into the some of the deepest questions of life Christianity today. As people move through stages of faith, is there any hope of being able to remain within the fold of the "old religion" which is often steeped so deeply in doctrine and dogma that authentic spiritual experience is backgrounded it and in some ways, forgotten? Why are so many people drawn to eastern traditions like Zen and yoga which are rooted in spiritual practice and experience?
Needleman introduces us to three Christians in order to explore the question, "what is the heart of Christianity? There must be such a heart, and inner core. I don't know what sorts of perceptions or impressions will give rise to the intuition of what Christianity is. I want to know, what is the *being* of Christianity?"
Anyone who is asking questions about Being, is clearly on the track of presenting a very different view of Christianity.
Each one of Needleman's "three Christians," answers this question with a slightly different emphasis. It is striking that Needleman asks all these questions as a non-Christian. Because of this, the book is written in the spirit of curiosity as Needleman tries to discover answers to questions that non-Christians ask.
He is freed from a doctrinal desire that needs religion to follow a certain trajectory in order to be deemed Christian. While I often appreciate the challenges if contemporary atheists, I often get a sense they want to shoot holes in traditional Christianity with a sort of cynical glee. Needleman does no such thing. Nor, does he inquire as a New Age spiritualist who can make a mucky mess by trying to messily integrate science and religion.
Rather, he asks as a philosopher and a man who has asked himself some of the most existential questions about being human. There is a fresh spirit of openness and lack of desire to try to prove or disprove something in order to calm a restless soul. This very spirit of inquiry gets to the essence of the notion that there is an inner and outer expression of The Way of Love.
He acknowledges that what we see as "'progress' in the modern world is "characterized as an imbalanced attention to the outward direction force of life combined with a false identification" of the "inner realm" of who we think we are. I understand this as the Christianity which seems to focus on bells and whistles or church suppers and gatherings or prescribed behavioral or social and political actions without the necessary move towards a transformation of the heart. He writes:
"Mysticism and spirituality by themselves are not enough. Social action and therapeutic caring by themselves are not enough. Nor is it enough merely to reach for both at the same time. The lost element in our lives is the force within myself that can attend to both movements of human nature within my own being and then guide the arising of this force within my neighbor in a manner suited to his understanding."
Those sentences alone invite a reflection that can take years. I could almost FEEL the energetic, organic movement of inner spiritual experience and outer social action and caring along with the need for a deep quality of attention as I walk through life.
A heart transformed by love engages in social action and therapeutic caring for others in a very different way. (And Needleman highlights that one of the core tenets of Christianity is social action and caring for one's neighbor in order to honor the directive to "love one's neighbor as oneself.") Knowing thyself deeply births a humility in our limitations as incarnate humans which births compassion for others who wrestle with their own demons as we wrestle with ours.
I loved this book and it is striking that a non-Christian writes a book that is so deeply Christian and respectful of the depth of the tradition. I recommend reading it in a group in order to flesh out the many consciousness altering ideas and "taste" the book more fully within community. -
Fantastic book. Needleman is a wonderful teacher-as-writer. He poses questions so that they can hang breathlessly in the air, begging investigation. He helps you to think about ancient subjects in new ways, in unexpected ways. His teaching stories are very "Gurdjieff" -- is it a story? Did it really happen?
This book is one to re-read every couple of years. -
The writings of an honest seeker. Highly recommended if you are wondering about the purpose of true religion.
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I had thought I would only reread the opening section of this book—Three Christians—because I love the portrait the author draws there of three unusual Christians and their transformative practices, but as I finished that section I continued and reread the whole book. I was still in that mood of disgust with religious dogma that the novels of Marilyn Robinson had inspired, wanted to get back to a Christianity that seemed more sane.
Jacob Needleman is a follower of Gurdjieff who was also a professor and a student of world religions; he seemed, as a scholar, reluctant to reveal his Gurdjieff association, and that’s understandable, because many people—Christians in particular—would find it suspect. But when he finally gave up the scholarly pose and wrote personally and from the heart, in What is God?, he wrote his best and most valuable book. Lost Christianity—and various other early works—seems on the way to writing that book.
I am always nourished by the portraits of the three Christians. One was a Russian Orthodox bishop named Anthony Bloom, a deeply serious man who struck Needleman as being unlike any other Christian he had ever met. He was impatient with questions about theory and dogma, but had various intriguing ideas about the practice of Christianity. He exhibited to Needleman “a quality of openness that one might wish to describe as ‘surrender,’” and the things he said about religious practice, just the quotations that I underlined, are intriguing:
“We have to get rid of emotions . . . in order to reach . . . feeling. . . . In the state of prayer one is vulnerable. . . .This is the whole aim of asceticism: to become open.”
Needleman notes that our beliefs may not have much effect on our actions (Marilynnne Robinson’s characters need to hear that). “Somehow, the intellectual grasping of a great idea is accompanied by the conviction, a sort of unconscious vow, that I will live according to this idea.” But the truth of the matter is that “I may think great and true thoughts, I may have absolute integrity in my intellect, and yet at the same time I may not be able to live my life according to what I know to be true or right.”
So what brings about a change? Needleman asks Bloom about the spiritual exercises of the early church fathers.
“You have been to our service,” Bloom says. “If you stand in the service with your hands down to the side, with your head slightly down—not too much—your weight evenly balanced . . . if one does this, one begins to see changes, certain muscles relax, others become firm—not tense. All this comes from the religious impulse. . . .”
He paused, and then said (the italics are Needleman’s), “The exercises you ask about originated in this way, from the Fathers observing what happened to them when they were in a state of prayer.”
So the state of prayer for them was more a physical act than a mental one. The physical discipline accomplishes what thinking cannot.
The second of the three Christians is much different, a Catholic missionary named Father Vincent whom Needleman happened to meet—they were suite mates—when he was giving lectures at a Catholic university (he doesn’t specify which one). Father Vincent smokes cigarettes and drinks beer, fairly copiously it seems. He isn’t fundamentally polite, ignores his new suite mate when Needleman arrives because he’s so absorbed in a football game. He’s paunchy and rough around the edges, shares with Bloom a certain indifference to the company of other people (if that’s an aspect of spiritual advancement, I’m not interested).
Needleman finds the man more irritating than anything else, but he’s also fascinated, especially by a certain physical presence and grace. One night after Needleman had spent the day lecturing and meeting with folks, he came back to find Father Vincent once again boozing it up and smoking, watching the tube, but asks if he wants to play some gin rummy. The man abandons what he’s been doing, though he was watching a fine movie, “Paths of Glory,” comes over and is immediately ready for the game, and though—as Needleman finds out later—it has been years since Father Vincent played, he cleans up on him. He has a concentration and intuition that are more important than his lack of skills.
The men play until 3:30, but Needleman jerks awake at 6:00 and discovers that his suite mates are already up, that they are in fact officiating at in a small chapel nearby. Father Vincent is “clean shaven and remarkably fresh,” and Needleman says something fascinating about this vision of him.
“He is adjusting some things on the altar. I have never seen—and yet I have seen—quite the attitude as there was in him, in his face and posture. It is the attitude of someone who has done the same thing thousands of times, every day of his life. There is clearly something remote and mechanical about his movements. Yet it is all animated by something else as well. I know what it is! He is like a woman moving around her kitchen! She has done it thousands of times, she knows exactly what is next, and her body manifests it through a sort of overeconomy; too little is put into the movements. Yet she is also strangely serious, and though both she and the husband who comes home to her knows his work is ‘more important,’ they both sense that her work exists at a deeper level than his.”
When Needleman finally has a serious conversation with the man, he turns out to be much more interesting than all the boozing and football watching would suggest. “Christian?” he says as he brings up his work in Africa. “I’m not a Christian! There are no Christians!”
He too is obviously a person whose physical life is more important than his mental life, though he didn’t learn through spiritual exercises. At one point he had helped an African medical team with a sudden epidemic, risking his life along with other men to get people onto boats and down a swollen river. He seems to have been awake for 48 hours straight.
“Toward the end of the second night, there was a moment just before dawn when the river was quiet and the people were all quiet. Suddenly, everything in myself became still, including my body, which had been in agony from stress and exhaustion. I felt the presence of God. The smells of the jungle and the river, the night sounds, the sensation of heat in the air—everything seemed part of the Oneness of God. Everything was motionless in eternity. All the things I had been afraid of—the sickness, the danger of drowning, of falling; all my personal revulsions and resentments—and there were plenty of them—everything appeared before me also as a part of God. I felt an overwhelming gratitude toward God that he had given me this work to do. I prayed in a way that I had never before prayed; I knew it was the Son praying to the Father through myself.”
Father Vincent has much more to say; the experiences he then describes—of gradually losing his personal identity—are fascinating and sound quite authentic. Needleman feels they can be best understood in light of the musings of his third Christian, Father Sylvan, whom Needleman met only briefly but who left behind notes from an extensive journal.
I found the Father Sylvan passages the least interesting, just because they weren’t told in stories. He seems in a way the deepest of the three men, but also the least comprehensible. I heard somewhere—I can’t remember where—that Father Sylvan is an invention, that this is actually a portrait of Needleman’s teacher in the Gurdjieff tradition, Lord Pendleton, but if that’s true, it’s a brilliant invention, because the writing in that journal sounds nothing like Needleman. It’s a different kind of mind altogether.
The book winds down after those first hundred pages. Needleman goes off to find people in the contemporary world who are engaged in these same traditions, and a number, including the founder of the Centering Prayer movement, Father Thomas Keating. But what strikes me again and again, even in the writings of Father Sylvan, is the way Christians seem almost afraid of these body-based spiritual exercises, even though they were practiced by the church fathers. The central notion of the book is that the Christian church took a disastrous turn when it became influenced by the Platonists in the early centuries, that the Eastern Orthodox church, which went in a different direction, is more authentic and helpful. But I kept thinking, as I read page after page about cautious Christians who contemplated a basic exercise like sitting still and in silence, Just do it! It shows its value in the doing. They’re so worried about finding justification in scripture that they’re ready to throw the baby out with the bath. Some do just that.
In the Eastern religions there’s no dogma in the way. We jump in and do the practice. Through that we discover everything. -
This is a fantastic book. The author's writing style was clear and concise and it almost read like a novel. Many, almost too many interesting thoughts and ideas were discussed and I will re-read the book in the future. For everyone interested in the missing spiritual aspect of Christianity this book will provide lots of food for thought. This was my first book by this author but definitely not the last one.
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This is a brilliant analysis of what's missing from modern Christianity: the power to transform us.
Needleman answers my two biggest questions: 1) Why did the Christianity I was raised in feel so unsatisfying?
2) Why do people calling themselves Christians behave so badly? -
Regret
Regret reading. Dr. Needham does not genuinely seek answers. He seeks to twist answers so he can assert his foregone conclusion. We get to follow him on his mind wandering internal dialogue-- not fun. -
Remains my favorite book on the ongoing tension between “Christianity” and “Christendom” and how the rediscovery of the former in its true sense is vastly preferable to the salvation of the latter.
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Self-deprecating accounts of meetings and friendships with wise and holy teachers.
Weaknesses: choppy, inconsistent, hard-to-follow -
For me, this book was OK but not great.
The book is in two parts. The first part is about his encounter with three different Christians: Father Sylvan, (an Egyptian monk?), Metropolitan Anthony (Eastern Orthodox) and Father Vicent (Roman Catholic).
From Metropolitan Anthony, he learned about "Apetheia" which is Freedom from Emotions (freedom from being controlled by your emotions) but he does not really develop this until the second part of the book in the chapter entitled, "St. Joseph's Abby" (Ch. 6).
Father Vicent is a Catholic Priest that he shares a room with while giving a five day lecture at some prestigious Catholic college on the East Coast of America. I am not really sure what he learned from Fr. Vicent except that maybe Christianity was a constant search? To me, it was vague what knowledge he gleaned from this priest.
Father Sylvan is the main person from which he learned. Mr. Needleman met Fr. Sylvan at an airport for a few hours and then never saw him again. One day, a package arrived for him and it was the notes of Fr. Sylvan that he wanted to be given to Mr. Needleman upon his death.
I found Fr. Sylvan's notes not too enjoyable to read and skipped over allot of what he wrote.
The best thing I received from the notes actually came from his quotes of St. Simeon the New Theologian which directed a person to focus their attention within, on their heart. Here is the quote of St. Simeon from pages 160 & 161 of the book:
" Proceeding in this way (i.e. Obedience and keeping a pure conscience toward both God and man), you will smooth for yourself a true and straight path to the third method of attention and prayer which is the following: The Mind should be in the Heart - a distinctive feature of the third method of prayer. It should guard the heart while it prays, revolve, remaining always within, and thence, from the depths of the heart, offers prayers to God (Everything is in this: work in this way until you are given to taste the Lord). When the Mind is there, within the heart, [and] at last tastes and sees that the Lord is good, and delights therein (the labor is ours but this tasting is the action of grace in a humble heart), then it will no longer wish to leave this place in the heart...and will always look inwardly into the depths of the heart and will remain revolving there, repulsing all thoughts sown by the devil (this is the third method of attention and prayer, practiced as it should be....therefore our Holy Fathers, hearkening to the Lord who said, "For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies and [He said], 'these are the things that defile a man (Matt. 15:19-20). Hearing also that in another place in the Gospels we are instructed to 'cleanse first that which is within the cup and the platter that the outside may be clean also' (Matt. 23:26). Having renounced all other spiritual work and [they] concentrated wholly on this one doing, that is on Guarding the Heart, convinced that, through this practice, they would easily attain every other virtue whereas without it, not a single virtue can be firmly established...." (pg. 160-161)
Thus, the "Lost Christianity" is a Christianity that directs itself inward to a persons heart and the cleansing of that heart.
That last sentence, above, is the point, I think, of the whole book - A person is to direct their attention within to the cleansing of their heart and towards "apetheia" which is not being controlled by your emotions.
Overall, I thought it was allot of reading for such a small return in understanding. He could have reduced it to a 20 page pamphlet and said the same thing.
If you enjoy reading for reading sake and like to hear personal stories and adventures, then you will probably enjoy this book. If, however, you are like me and read to understand and do not really want allot of story or embellishment, then you will not get much out of this book for all the reading you have to put into it, IMO.
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I bought this book many years ago. I read a dozen or so pages but decided to put it away for another time. Now was the time. I took it out of storage because I have an ongoing interest in Christianity. In the meantime I have read a lot of other books about religions and spirituality. The author, Jacob Needleman, is an esteemed academic specializing in philosophy and spiritual psychology. Obviously, he is a man who deserves to be taken seriously.
I only completed one third of the book therefore my criticisms may be unfair, but after reading that much I had a premonition that if I succeeded in completing the book I would be no closer to finding out what “Lost Christianity” was all about or how it might practically be of benefit to myself and mankind. Actually, there seemed to be a case for arguing that at the outset Needleman had a strong assumption about a ‘lost’ Christianity. He could not describe it. He could not define it. But if he traveled the globe, interviewed x number of people and immersed himself in the works of other academics, he would eventually ‘find’ the ‘lost’ Christianity. I asked myself ‘is the author lost?’ or ‘is Christianity lost?’
This is a biography by a man on the search for answers. His writing style is cerebral, the vocabulary scholarly. Meanings are frequently obscure. He tosses into his narrative various references to people, books and beliefs to enhance his arguments. Instead I was distracted and befuddled. I failed to flow with his rambling stream of consciousness. I found myself having to go back to reread the previous sentence or paragraph, to, for example, connect which ‘the latter’ he was referring to. I resigned myself to admit that the book was written for academics, philosophers and theologians. Who was I, trying to make sense of it? -
A philosopher investigates, out of genuine interest, a question of faith that many church goers may never ask....what is genuine Christianity?
He is essentially seeking the contemplative heart of the Christian tradition from an intellectual point of view, and so looks for a hidden tradition, or an esoteric relationship between religion and spirituality, and why the two can appear at once mutually exclusive and yet inseparable.
A book of two halves;
If my memory serves me well, I believe a large portion of the book is given to an interview with The late Metropolitan Anthony i.e Anthony Bloom and an anonymous trainee Catholic priest and that's as far as I recall...
Part two lost the plot a little.
I liked this immensely 20 years ago, but I'm not sure what I'd make of it now,
Too much Gurdjieff for my liking:-
Moon Food indeed!
Totally barking, mate! -
An exploration of inner or esoteric Christianity by an academic largerly through anecdote. While it merely hints at the subject and is by no means an academic treatement it is nonetheless an important work in that it points to a reality - perhaps THE reality - of an authentic Christian experience that is largely unknown to the modern world, which often suffers at the hands of a shallow and politicized religious offering.
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Needleman titles his book in a way suggesting that it could go in any number of uninteresting and cliché directions. However, Lost Christianity is a very refreshing look at Christianity and the missing link between “fallen man” and “theosis.” Needleman recovers the lost doctrine of the soul in relation to the Eastern religions.
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A fresh and honest look at Christianity -- a book that should be read multiple times as a meditation on life.
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on the emotionlessness of christianity
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Finally - a book about what Christianity really IS. A first-rate top-class book, full of wisdom and heart.
