The Shallows and the Deep

Oct 09, 2026 · Emmitt Owens

Two people can sit in the same pew, sing the same hymn and recite the same creed, yet live in completely different worlds. One is there because it’s Sunday. The other is there because they’ve been praying since 5 a.m. and something in them is on fire.

That isn’t a new observation. For nearly 2,000 years, Christians have described the faith as having layers: a shoreline you can wade in and an ocean you can drown in. The ancient writers called it milk and meat, the letter and the spirit, the outer court and the inner room. They drew maps of it, in ladders and castles and clouds, and they agreed on one thing: God doesn’t force anyone deeper than they want to go. You only go as far as you seek.

I’ve been in church most of my life, and for as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted more than what was handed to me on Sunday. I studied God, and I studied the people who studied God: the saints, the scholars and the strange ones. I’ve read things most churchgoers would never pick up, including books on the occult and traditions that weren’t Christian at all. The surprising thing is that the honest ones kept pointing me in the same direction. Up. Back to God. Not away from him.

I’m not the first to notice this. Some of the most famous names in the history of the occult were believers who saw their work as a way of reaching God:

• Johannes Trithemius (1462–1516). A Benedictine abbot who wrote on angels, ciphers and hidden knowledge, and who remained a monk his entire life.
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535). Author of Three Books of Occult Philosophy, the most influential magical text of the Renaissance. He taught that all true magic must be rooted in God. He also wrote a book warning against the vanity of human learning, including his own magical studies, though he went on to publish Three Books afterward.
• Paracelsus (1493–1541). The Swiss physician and alchemist who helped lay the foundations of modern medicine. He wrote as much about Christ, prayer and Scripture as he did about chemistry.
• John Dee (1527–c. 1609). Mathematician and astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. His famous conversations with angels began with prayer, and he considered himself a faithful Christian to the end.
• Jacob Boehme (1575–1624). A Lutheran shoemaker whose visions of God, light and darkness shaped centuries of Christian mysticism and esoteric thought.
• Isaac Newton (1643–1727). He wrote more about alchemy and biblical prophecy than about gravity. He believed deeply in God, though he rejected the Trinity.
• Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803). Known as “the Unknown Philosopher,” he left ritual magic behind for what he called the inner way: the soul’s direct return to God through Christ.
• Éliphas Lévi (1810–1875). He trained for the Catholic priesthood before becoming the father of modern French occultism. He insisted his work was compatible with the Church and reportedly received its last rites before he died.
• Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942). Co-creator of the Rider-Waite deck, the most famous tarot deck in the world. He later rewrote his order’s rituals around Christian mysticism.
• Dion Fortune (1890–1946). A leading English occultist who also founded a Christian mystical group devoted to the “Master Jesus.”
• Valentin Tomberg (1900–1973). Author of Meditations on the Tarot, which treats the 22 major cards as doorways into Christian contemplation. He later became a Catholic, and a German edition of the book carried an afterword by the Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar.

Believing in God didn’t make everything they did right, and the church condemned many of their practices for good reason. But it says something that so many people who went digging in the strangest corners of the spiritual world kept finding him at the bottom.

That’s what this piece is about. It isn’t about a secret club, and it isn’t a ranking of who’s the better Christian. It’s about the simple fact that the faith goes deeper than most of us were ever shown, and that the door is open to anyone willing to keep knocking.

Here’s what those levels looked like to the people who mapped them, and what they warned about along the way.

At a glance

The early church, 50 to 500

• c. 55 – Paul: milk and meat. Spiritual maturity comes in stages (1 Corinthians 3).
• c. 100 – The Didache. Pray three times a day; fast on Wednesdays and Fridays.
• c. 180 – Irenaeus answers the Gnostics. The faith is open to all, not a secret for an elite.
• c. 200 – Tertullian and the sign of the cross. Christians trace the cross at every coming and going.
• c. 215 – The Apostolic Tradition. Years of preparation, an all-night vigil and triple immersion.
• c. 230 – Origen. Scripture has a body, a soul and a spirit.
• c. 350–390 – Lectures on the mysteries in Jerusalem. The newly baptized learn what the rites meant.

Monks and mystics, 500 to 1450

• c. 500 – Pseudo-Dionysius. Purification, illumination and perfection: the root of the three ways.
• 600s – John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent and its 30 rungs.
• 1215 – The Fourth Lateran Council. “Transubstantiation” enters an official church decree.
• 1300s – The hesychasts and The Cloud of Unknowing. Stillness, the Jesus Prayer and God found in darkness.

Renaissance and Reformation, 1450 to 1650

• 1463 – Ficino translates Hermes. Siena Cathedral sets Hermes into its floor in 1488.
• 1486 – Pico della Mirandola. His 900 theses tie the Kabbalah to Christ.
• 1529 – Luther and Zwingli at Marburg. Protestants split over what the bread is.
• 1577 – Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. The Interior Castle is written; John is jailed by his own order.
• 1614 – Isaac Casaubon. He shows the Hermetic texts were written after Christ.

The modern church, 1650 to today

• 1742 – The St. Benedict medal is approved. A prayer of renunciation, often mistaken for a charm.
• 1853 – The Two Babylons. Catholic practice is attacked as paganism in disguise.
• 1972 – The Catholic catechumenate is restored. The ancient stages of initiation return.

Milk and meat

The idea of spiritual levels begins in the New Testament itself. Paul tells the church at Corinth that he couldn’t yet speak to them as spiritual people, only as “babes in Christ.” He fed them milk, not meat, because they weren’t ready for it (1 Corinthians 3:1–2).

The letter to the Hebrews scolds its readers in the same way. By now they ought to be teachers, yet they still need someone to teach them the basics. Solid food, the writer says, belongs to the mature, to those whose senses have been trained by practice (Hebrews 5:12–14). Then comes the challenge: leave the elementary teachings behind and “go on unto perfection” (Hebrews 6:1).

Jesus drew the same line. He told his disciples that the mystery of the kingdom had been given to them, but to outsiders everything came in parables (Mark 4:11). The same story could be a pleasant farm tale to one listener and a key to heaven for another. The difference was who stayed afterward to ask what it meant (Mark 4:10).

Notice what the milk-and-meat image assumes. Milk isn’t bad. Every Christian starts there. The problem is staying on it.

The mysteries behind the door

The early church didn’t just talk about levels; it built them into worship. From about the 3rd century, people preparing for baptism, known as catechumens, heard the sermon and the Scripture readings and were then dismissed before the Eucharist began. Only the baptized stayed for what came next.

The Greek word for these rites was mysterion, meaning mystery. Latin translated it as sacramentum, the root of our word “sacrament.” Certain teachings, especially those about the Eucharist and the Trinity, were reserved for after baptism. In Jerusalem, the newly baptized attended special lectures during Easter week that explained what had just happened to them. These became known as the Mystagogical Catecheses, lessons that “lead into the mysteries.”

The method was experience first and explanation second. You went down into the water, and only then were you told what the water meant. The Orthodox Divine Liturgy still preserves an echo of this practice: before the creed, the deacon calls out, “The doors! The doors!”

One caution is in order. Historians call this practice the disciplina arcani, “the discipline of the secret,” but the name isn’t ancient. It was coined by Jean Daillé, a 17th-century Calvinist writer. Nor was it a secret society. Anyone could become a catechumen. The door was closed only to those who hadn’t yet walked through it.

The original ceremonies, and what we traded them for

The early rites were not quick. One church manual, the Apostolic Tradition, describes candidates hearing the word for up to three years before baptism. Scholars still debate whether it was written by Hippolytus of Rome around 215 or compiled later from several sources, but it offers the fullest picture we have.

Here is the baptism it describes. Candidates fasted, underwent exorcism and kept watch all night, a vigil that other early writers, such as Tertullian, tied to Easter. At cockcrow, they went to flowing water, removed their clothes and renounced Satan aloud. They were anointed with oil and then plunged into the water three times, once for each question: Do you believe in God the Father? In Christ Jesus? In the Holy Spirit? They rose from the water, were anointed again, dressed in fresh clothes and were led into the church. Their first communion included bread and wine along with a cup of water and a cup of milk and honey: the promised land, finally entered.

The rest of early Christian life had its own rhythms. The Didache, a church manual from around the year 100, instructs believers to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day and to fast every Wednesday and Friday. Communion was originally part of a full shared meal, the agape or “love feast” (1 Corinthians 11; Jude 12). Believers greeted one another with a holy kiss (Romans 16:16).

Compare that with what many churches do today. New believers once spent up to three years in preparation, with exorcisms and fasting, before they were baptized. Now it’s often a class or two, and sometimes a single conversation with the pastor. Baptism was once an all-night vigil, often kept at Easter, that ended at dawn with triple immersion, oil, new clothes and a cup of milk and honey. Now it is usually a brief moment in any Sunday service, sometimes just a sprinkling of water. The early church explained the meaning of the rites afterward, once you had lived through them. Today, if anything is explained, it’s explained beforehand.

Communion was once celebrated every Lord’s Day as part of a shared meal. Many churches now hold it monthly or quarterly, and the meal itself has become a potluck or a coffee hour. The cup once held wine, blessed with long prayers. Now it’s often grape juice, which Thomas Welch developed for communion in 1869, served alongside a wafer or a cracker. Believers once greeted one another with a holy kiss. Now it’s a handshake or a wave during the greeting time.

The daily rhythm changed as well. Christians once prayed at fixed hours, three times a day; now most pray when they find the time. They once fasted twice a week; now most fast rarely, if ever, outside of Lent. And they once faced east to pray, toward the rising sun, as a sign that Christ would return like the dawn. Now most congregations face a stage and screens.

That trade wasn’t always careless. Reformers in the 1500s stripped away rites they believed had become superstition or empty show, and Baptists later restored full immersion for believers. Grape juice came from temperance-minded Christians who wanted recovering alcoholics to be able to take communion. Many churches preserved much of the old pattern: Orthodox churches still immerse infants three times and give them communion immediately, and the Catholic Church restored a multi-stage catechumenate for adults in 1972.

But something real was lost in many places. The old rites taught through the body. You didn’t simply hear that baptism was death and resurrection; you went under in the dark and came up at dawn. When the ceremonies shrink, it becomes easier to stay on the surface, because nothing in the service asks you to go deeper.

The bread and the wine

If any single rite reveals the levels of Christianity, it’s communion. The same bread is a snack-sized cracker to one person and the body of God to another.

The oldest layer. Bread and wine appear long before the Last Supper. Melchizedek, the mysterious priest-king of Salem, brought them out to bless Abraham (Genesis 14:18). Hebrews later calls Jesus a priest “after the order of Melchizedek” (Hebrews 7). The early church read that encounter as the first communion, hidden in plain sight.

The words that divided the crowd. In John 6, Jesus says that unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Many disciples found the teaching too hard to accept and walked away (John 6:53–66). Jesus didn’t call them back to soften it. It’s the milk-and-meat line again, this time at the dinner table.

How the first Christians understood it. Paul warned that anyone who ate without “discerning the Lord’s body” ate judgment on themselves (1 Corinthians 11:29). Around 110, Ignatius of Antioch called the bread “the medicine of immortality” (Letter to the Ephesians 20). Around 155, Justin Martyr explained to the Roman emperor that Christians did not receive it as common bread and common drink (First Apology 66). The secrecy surrounding the meal led pagans to spread rumors that Christians were cannibals.

The early prayers were rich with symbolism. The Didache compares the bread to grain once scattered over the hills and gathered into a single loaf, just as the church is gathered from the ends of the earth. Wine was mixed with water, which writers such as Cyprian read as Christ united with his people, or as the blood and water that flowed from his side (John 19:34). And on the road to Emmaus, the risen Jesus walked for miles with two disciples who didn’t recognize him. They knew him only in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24:30–35).

The great split. For 1,500 years, nearly all Christians believed Christ was truly present in the bread and wine, though they described that presence in different ways, and a few notable thinkers, such as Ratramnus and Berengar of Tours, dissented. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council became the first to use the word “transubstantiation” in an official decree: the bread becomes Christ’s body while still appearing to be bread. The Council of Trent defined the doctrine more fully in 1551. The Reformation shattered that consensus and left five main views.

The Catholic Church teaches transubstantiation: the bread truly becomes Christ’s body, and only its appearance as bread remains. The Orthodox churches also believe the bread truly becomes Christ’s body, but they call it a mystery and decline to explain how it happens in philosophical terms. Martin Luther and the Lutherans hold to what is called sacramental union: the bread remains real bread, but Christ’s body is present “in, with and under” it. John Calvin and the Reformed churches teach a spiritual presence: the bread is bread, but through it the Holy Spirit truly feeds believers with Christ himself. And Ulrich Zwingli, followed today by most Baptists and evangelicals, saw it as a memorial: the bread is a sign that helps us remember what Christ did.

Luther and Zwingli met at Marburg in 1529 to settle the matter. Luther reportedly chalked the Latin words Hoc est corpus meum, “This is my body,” onto the table and refused to budge. The two men agreed on 14 of 15 points and split over the last one.

Whatever you believe the bread to be, the old writers would ask the same question: Do you come to the table expecting something, or nothing? The answer usually determines what you receive.

One verse, four depths

If worship had layers, so did the Bible. Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–254) taught that Scripture is built like a human being. It has a body (the plain story), a soul (its moral lesson) and a spirit (its hidden meaning about Christ and heaven). Simple readers are nourished by the body, while the more advanced climb toward the spirit (On First Principles, Book 4).

Later Christians expanded this idea into four senses of Scripture. John Cassian, writing around 420, used Jerusalem as the classic example.

The first is the literal sense, which asks what actually happened. Read this way, Jerusalem is simply the real city in Judea. The second is the allegorical sense, which asks what a passage says about Christ and his church. Here, Jerusalem becomes the church itself. The third is the moral sense, sometimes called the tropological, which asks how you should live. In this reading, Jerusalem stands for the human soul. The fourth is the anagogical sense, which asks where everything is ultimately heading. At this depth, Jerusalem is the heavenly city of God.

Medieval students memorized the scheme in a short Latin rhyme: the letter teaches what happened, allegory what to believe, the moral sense what to do and anagogy where you’re going.

This is the clearest picture of levels in the entire tradition. No one throws out the literal reading. A shallow reader stops there; a deep reader keeps going down through the same words. The text doesn’t change. The reader does.

The three ways

The most influential map of the spiritual life has three stages. Evagrius Ponticus, a 4th-century desert monk, sketched an early version: first the practical life of fighting one’s vices, then the contemplation of God in creation, and finally the knowledge of God himself. Around 500, a Syrian writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius gave the stages their classic form: purification, illumination and perfection. Later writers, notably Bonaventure in the 13th century, settled on the names that endured: the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways.

1. Purgation. Cleaning house: repentance, confession, prayer, fasting and breaking bad habits. This is where most Christians spend most of their lives, and there’s no shame in it.
2. Illumination. The lights come on. Scripture begins to open up, prayer becomes a conversation instead of a checklist, and you start to see God in ordinary things.
3. Union. The rarest stage. The soul rests in God without words or effort. The mystics describe it in the language of marriage, fire and light, because ordinary words fail.

For centuries, Catholic and Orthodox spiritual writers organized their counsel around these three ways. They also insisted that the stages aren’t a ladder you climb once and leave behind. Even saints near the top said they were still repenting.

Ladders and castles

Two writers turned these levels into images people still use today.

The ladder. In the 7th century, John Climacus, abbot of the monastery at Mount Sinai, wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent. Modeled on the ladder Jacob saw reaching to heaven (Genesis 28:12), it has 30 rungs, one for each year of Jesus’s hidden life before his ministry. The lowest rungs concern leaving the world behind; the middle rungs battle anger, lust, pride and despair; the top rung is love. A famous 12th-century icon of the ladder at St. Catherine’s Monastery shows monks climbing while small demons pull some of them off. Going deeper takes effort, and falling is always possible.

The castle. In 1577, the Spanish nun Teresa of Ávila wrote The Interior Castle. She pictured the soul as a castle carved from a single diamond, with seven sets of rooms and God dwelling in the innermost chamber. Many people, she wrote, spend their entire lives circling the outer walls without realizing there’s anything inside. The door into the castle is prayer.

Teresa’s image captures the whole idea in a single picture. The castle is already inside every believer. Whether you remain in the courtyard or walk to the center depends on how far you’re willing to go in.

Into the dark

This is where Christian mysticism becomes strange. You might expect the deepest level to be the brightest, but many mystics said the opposite.

Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395) noticed that in Exodus, God first meets Moses in a burning bush (light), later in a cloud and finally in “thick darkness” on Mount Sinai (Exodus 20:21). Gregory read that progression as a map: the closer you come to God, the more you realize he is beyond anything you can picture or define. This is known as the apophatic way, knowing God by acknowledging what he is not.

An anonymous 14th-century English monk took the idea further in The Cloud of Unknowing. You can’t reach God by thinking, he wrote; you reach him by love, sending a “sharp dart of longing love” up into the cloud that hides him.

In the Eastern church, the monks of Mount Athos practiced hesychasm, from the Greek word for stillness. They repeated the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner”) in rhythm with their breathing until the prayer seemed to pray itself. Some reported seeing an uncreated light, the same light the disciples saw when Jesus was transfigured on the mountain. In the 1300s, Gregory Palamas rose to their defense.

The goal of all this has a name: theosis, being made like God. Second Peter promises that believers can become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). Athanasius (c. 296–373) put it boldly: God became human so that humans might become divine. Not gods in their own right, but filled with God the way iron in a fire glows with heat it doesn’t own.

Seals, signs and sigils

The word “sigil” comes from the Latin sigillum, meaning a little seal. Christianity has seals of its own, and the first one isn’t drawn on anything. It’s placed on a person.

Paul says believers are “sealed with that holy Spirit of promise” (Ephesians 1:13; see also 2 Corinthians 1:22). Revelation pictures God’s servants marked with a seal on their foreheads (Revelation 7:3). Early Christians called baptism the sphragis, the Greek word for seal, and Orthodox churches still anoint the newly baptized with the words “The seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

The sign of the cross was the everyday version. Around 200, Tertullian wrote that Christians traced it on their foreheads at every coming and going: when getting dressed, lighting a lamp or sitting down to eat (De Corona 3).

Then there were the symbols believers carved and painted in the places where they lived and were buried.

The oldest is the fish, the ichthys, which appears in the 2nd century. Its Greek letters spelled out “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Savior,” and it called to mind the waters of baptism. Around the same time, the anchor began appearing in the catacombs of the 2nd and 3rd centuries. It stood for hope, “an anchor of the soul” (Hebrews 6:19), and with its crossbar it doubled as a discreetly disguised cross. By the 3rd century, believers were painting the Good Shepherd, Christ carrying the lost sheep home on his shoulders (Luke 15).

Around the year 200, scribes copying the Gospels began using the staurogram (⳨), a cross with a small loop at the top that resembles a man hanging on a cross. After Constantine’s victory in 312, the Chi-Rho (☧), which joins the first two Greek letters of “Christ,” spread across the empire. From the 4th century onward, Christians also used the Alpha and Omega, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet, to represent Christ as the beginning and the end (Revelation 22:13).

Some symbols came from the animal world. In late antiquity, the peacock stood for immortality, because people believed its flesh never decayed. In the Middle Ages, the pelican became an image of Christ feeding his people with his own blood, drawn from the old legend that a mother pelican pierces her breast to feed her young. And in the medieval church, especially from the 1400s on, believers carved and painted IHS, the first three Greek letters of the name “Jesus.”

The strangest of all is the SATOR square, a five-by-five word puzzle scratched into a wall at Pompeii before the city’s destruction in 79. Its letters can be rearranged to spell PATER NOSTER (“Our Father”) in the shape of a cross, with two As and two Os, alpha and omega, left over. Scholars still debate whether it is Christian or a coincidence.

A symbol works on levels, too. To an outsider, an anchor is just an anchor. To someone who knows, it’s a cross holding them steady in a storm.

When Christianity and the occult shared a room

The line between Christian mystery and the occult has always been real. But at several points in history, the two stood so close together that it was hard to tell them apart.

The Magi. The first people outside Jesus’s family to worship him weren’t priests or rabbis. They were magoi, wise men from the East (Matthew 2:1–12). The Greek historian Herodotus described the Magi as a priestly tribe of the Medes, later part of the Persian Empire, known for interpreting dreams; later writers associated them with reading the stars. Our word “magic” comes from their name. Matthew never says there were three of them, or that they were kings. He says only that they followed a star.

The early church saw the story as the end of magic, not an endorsement of it. Around 110, Ignatius of Antioch wrote that when the star appeared, all sorcery was undone (Letter to the Ephesians 19). Tertullian argued that astrology had been tolerated only until the Gospel arrived. The astrologers found what their stars were pointing to, knelt and went home by another way.

Hermes in the cathedral. In 1463, the Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino translated a collection of Greek writings known as the Corpus Hermeticum for his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici. Cosimo had Ficino set aside his translation of Plato to complete it first. The texts were said to come from Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-great Hermes,” an Egyptian sage believed to be as old as Moses. They spoke of a divine Word, a creator God and the rebirth of the soul. Renaissance Christians were thrilled; here, they believed, was a pagan prophet who had glimpsed Christ centuries in advance. Early church writers such as Lactantius had already quoted Hermes with respect.

The enthusiasm reached all the way to the floor of Siena Cathedral. In 1488, a marble mosaic of Hermes Trismegistus was set into the pavement at the cathedral’s entrance, identifying him as a contemporary of Moses. It’s still there today.

Then scholarship caught up. In 1614, Isaac Casaubon analyzed the Greek and showed that the texts were written in the early Christian era, not in the time of Moses. They hadn’t predicted Christianity; they had absorbed ideas from the same world that produced it. Yet the Hermetic writings lived on and became a foundation of Western occultism. Christianity and modern magic share an ancestor that Christians themselves once set into the floors of their cathedrals.

The Christian Kabbalah. Kabbalah is the Jewish mystical tradition that finds hidden meaning in the letters and numbers of Hebrew Scripture. In 1486, the young Italian nobleman Giovanni Pico della Mirandola published 900 theses for public debate. Among them was the claim that no science more strongly confirms the divinity of Christ than magic and Kabbalah. The following year, a papal commission objected to 13 of the theses, and Pope Innocent VIII then condemned all 900.

The German scholar Johannes Reuchlin went further. In On the Wonder-Working Word (1494), he took God’s four-letter Hebrew name, YHWH, and inserted the letter shin in the middle. The result, YHSWH, could be read as “Yehoshua,” or Jesus. To Reuchlin, this proved that Jesus’s name was hidden inside God’s own name. To his critics, it looked like spell-craft. Years later, when he defended Jewish books against those who wanted them burned, he spent years under investigation for heresy.

These three stories share the pattern this article keeps uncovering. Seekers who went looking in strange places often came back pointing to Christ, and the church repeatedly had to sort out which parts were mystery and which were magic.

King Solomon: the temple, the song and the ring

Solomon appears at every level of this story: in the Bible, in Christian mysticism and in the occult. Each version of him teaches something different.

The temple: levels built in stone. Solomon built the first Temple in Jerusalem (1 Kings 6), and its layout turned the levels of faith into architecture. There were outer courts where the people gathered, then the Holy Place where only priests served, and finally the Holy of Holies behind a heavy veil. Only the high priest could enter it, and only once a year (Hebrews 9:7). When Jesus died, the Gospels say, the veil tore from top to bottom (Matthew 27:51). Hebrews calls this a “new and living way” through the veil, opened to every believer (Hebrews 10:19–20). Paul goes further still: you are now the temple (1 Corinthians 3:16). The innermost room is no longer in Jerusalem. It’s inside you, like Teresa’s castle.

The song: the mystics’ favorite book. Tradition credits Solomon with the Song of Songs, a frankly romantic poem about two lovers. Origen wrote that Jewish teachers didn’t allow young students to study it until they were mature, along with the opening of Genesis and Ezekiel’s vision of God’s chariot. Christian mystics read it as a portrait of the love between God and the soul. Bernard of Clairvaux preached 86 sermons on it in the 1100s and never got past the beginning of chapter 3. To a surface reader, it’s a love poem. To the mystics, it was a map of union with God.

The ring: the legend that went the other way. Solomon’s famous wisdom (1 Kings 3–4) eventually grew into legend. In the 1st century, Josephus described a Jewish exorcist named Eleazar driving out a demon before the future emperor Vespasian, using a ring and incantations attributed to Solomon (Antiquities 8.2.5). An early Christian-era text, the Testament of Solomon, imagined God giving Solomon a ring that allowed him to command demons to build the Temple. In the Middle Ages, the ring became the “Seal of Solomon,” drawn as a six-pointed star or a pentagram. Renaissance magicians then wrote spell books in his name, such as the Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key of Solomon, filled with sigils for summoning spirits.

The church never accepted any of it. Around 363, the Council of Laodicea barred clergy from practicing magic or making amulets (Canon 36). The Bible’s own Solomon is a warning, not a wizard. The wisest man who ever lived drifted into idolatry in his old age (1 Kings 11:4). Wisdom without faithfulness couldn’t save him. Jesus pointed past him entirely: “A greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42).

Mystery, not magic

It’s tempting to call the deep end of Christianity “magic.” There really is something wondrous down there: water that makes you new, bread that carries Christ and prayer that changes the one who prays. But the ancient writers drew a firm line between mystery and magic, and it’s worth understanding why.

Magic tries to control spiritual power; mystery surrenders to it. In Acts, a sorcerer named Simon Magus sees the apostles’ power and tries to buy it, and Peter tells him his money can perish with him (Acts 8:18–20). Not long afterward, new believers in Ephesus publicly burned their books of magic, worth 50,000 pieces of silver (Acts 19:19). The mystics never claimed a technique for making God act. Everything at the deep end is grace, a gift to be received.

The Gnostic warning. The early church also faced groups that loved the idea of levels a little too much. Some 2nd-century Gnostic teachers, such as the followers of Valentinus, divided humanity into three classes: spiritual people destined for salvation, ordinary believers capable of only a lesser salvation and material people beyond help. Salvation, they taught, came through secret knowledge (gnosis) given only to the elite.

Around 180, Irenaeus of Lyon answered them in a five-volume work, Against Heresies. His reply was simple: the apostles taught the faith openly to everyone; they did not whisper it to an inner circle. Paul had already supplied the test: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). If going deeper makes someone look down on shallow Christians, they have gone in the wrong direction.

Holy water, salt and medals

Walk into a Catholic or Orthodox church and you’ll see objects that, to an outsider, look a lot like charms: a font of blessed water by the door, blessed salt, oil, candles and medals stamped with letters. These are called sacramentals. Hundreds of millions of Christians use them today, and they are one of the biggest sources of the “that’s occult” confusion.

These practices are rooted in the Bible itself:

• Elisha healed a contaminated spring by throwing salt into it (2 Kings 2:19–22). The traditional blessing for holy water still adds salt in memory of that miracle.
• The apostles anointed the sick with oil and healed them (Mark 6:13), and James tells the elders of the church to do the same (James 5:14).
• People were healed by cloths that had touched Paul (Acts 19:11–12), and others laid the sick in the street, hoping Peter’s shadow would fall on them (Acts 5:15).

The St. Benedict medal is the best example. Its back is covered with Latin initials that look like a cipher. Spelled out, they form short prayers.

Around the cross are four letters, C S P B, for Crux Sancti Patris Benedicti: “The cross of our holy father Benedict.” Running down the upright beam of the cross is C S S M L, Crux Sacra Sit Mihi Lux: “May the holy cross be my light.” Across the crossbeam is N D S M D, Non Draco Sit Mihi Dux: “Let not the dragon be my guide.”

Around the edge of the medal runs a short prayer of exorcism. It begins with V R S, Vade Retro Satana: “Get behind me, Satan.” Next comes N S M V, Numquam Suade Mihi Vana: “Never tempt me with vain things.” Then S M Q L, Sunt Mala Quae Libas: “What you offer is evil.” And it ends with I V B, Ipse Venena Bibas: “Drink the poison yourself.”

To someone who can’t read it, the medal looks like a sigil. To someone who can, it’s a prayer of renunciation, the same vow a candidate declared at the water’s edge in the early church. Pope Benedict XIV formally approved the medal in 1742.

Where the church draws the line. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states that sacramentals don’t work automatically. They prepare a person to receive grace through the prayer of the church and the faith of the one using them (sections 1667–1670). Treating a religious object as though it works on its own, regardless of faith, is the sin of superstition (section 2111). Attempting to control hidden powers is condemned as magic (section 2117).

That’s the whole difference in a sentence. A charm is supposed to work whether or not you love God. A sacramental is only a reminder and a prayer, and it’s useless without him. The water is the same water. What you bring to it is not.

Called to your depth

Here is something the mystics teach that surprises many people: you don’t choose your level on your own. God calls each person, and the call isn’t the same for everyone.

The Bible is full of different measures. One servant receives five talents, another two and another one (Matthew 25:15). Paul says the Spirit distributes gifts to each person “as he will” (1 Corinthians 12:11). When Martha complained that her sister Mary was sitting at Jesus’s feet instead of helping in the kitchen, Jesus said Mary had chosen the good part. He didn’t say Martha was lost (Luke 10:38–42). And Jesus warned that more is required of the one to whom more has been given (Luke 12:48).

Teresa of Ávila stated plainly that God doesn’t lead everyone by the same road and that some very holy people never receive the mystical experiences she described. Holiness, she insisted, is measured by love and obedience, not by visions.

So two truths must be held together. The invitation to go deeper is for everyone: “Be ye therefore perfect” was spoken to the whole crowd (Matthew 5:48). But the path, the pace and the gifts are God’s to give. Some people are called to the mountaintop, like Moses. Others are called to stay in the camp and keep the bread baking. Both are called.

The practical result is freeing. You don’t have to fake a depth you haven’t been given. But neither can you use “I’m just not the deep type” as an excuse to ignore a knock you can clearly hear. When the call comes, the only question is whether you will answer.

“That looks pagan to me”

Go deep enough, and someone in your own church will start to worry about you. Candles, incense, chanting, icons, fasting, silence, oil and the sign of the cross can all look like witchcraft to a Christian who has only ever known a stage and a worship band. It’s one of the oldest confusions in the church.

Paul explained why: the natural person doesn’t receive the things of the Spirit, because they seem like foolishness to him (1 Corinthians 2:14). From the shallow end, the deep end looks strange.

It happened to Jesus first. When he cast out demons, religious experts from Jerusalem claimed he did it by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons (Mark 3:22). At Pentecost, when the disciples poured into the street speaking in other languages, the crowd mocked them as drunk (Acts 2:13). When Paul told his story to the Roman governor Festus, Festus shouted that too much learning had driven him mad (Acts 26:24).

It kept happening to the mystics. Again and again, the church’s deepest believers were suspected by members of their own church.

In 1329, shortly after the German mystic Meister Eckhart died, a papal bull condemned 28 statements drawn from his sermons on the soul’s union with God. A few years later, in the 1330s, the hesychast monks of Mount Athos came under attack. The scholar Barlaam of Calabria mocked their breathing prayer and dismissed them as “navel-souls,” but in the end the church sided with the monks.

The pattern repeated itself in Spain two centuries later. In the 1570s, the Inquisition examined Teresa of Ávila’s autobiography on suspicion of false mysticism; the church declared her a saint in 1622. Her friend and fellow reformer, John of the Cross, fared worse. In 1577, his own Carmelite brothers locked him in a tiny cell in Toledo, where he remained for nine months. In that cell he wrote some of his greatest poetry, and in 1578 he escaped.

Then the accusation became a movement. In 1853, a Scottish minister named Alexander Hislop published The Two Babylons, which claimed that Catholic practices were Babylonian paganism in disguise. Historians have since rejected its evidence, but its ideas still circulate online. The Puritans went even further: England’s Parliament banned Christmas in 1647, and Massachusetts outlawed its celebration from 1659 to 1681.

Most of these supposedly pagan practices have Christian roots older than the objections to them. Incense was offered in the Temple (Exodus 30) and fills heaven’s throne room as the prayers of the saints (Revelation 8:4). Anointing with oil appears in James 5:14. Fasting, fixed-hour prayer and the holy kiss are all found in the New Testament itself. When the early church borrowed a pagan form, it emptied it and filled it with new meaning, just as it did with the fish.

But sometimes the worry is justified. The Bible instructs believers to test the spirits (1 John 4:1) and warns against philosophies that do not come from Christ (Colossians 2:8). Real syncretism happens: people drift from Christian mysticism into tarot, spell work or a vague spirituality in which Jesus is just one option among many. Jesus offered the simplest test: you will know a tree by its fruit (Matthew 7:16). Ask a few questions:

• Does it point to Jesus, or past him?
• Does it agree with Scripture, or does it require a secret source to make sense?
• Does it make you more loving and humble, or more proud and superior?
• Is it received as grace, or used as a technique to gain power?

If the answers are Jesus, Scripture, love and grace, it isn’t paganism. It’s simply deep water. And if you’re the one standing on the shore watching someone swim out, the tradition’s advice is the same: before you call it pagan, ask what it means. You may find an invitation.

The Jesus of the Muslim mystics

Many Christians assume Muslims don’t believe in Jesus. They do, just not in the way Christians do. In Islam, Jesus (Isa) is one of the greatest prophets: the Messiah, born of the Virgin Mary, a worker of miracles and the bearer of a holy book, the Injil, or Gospel. The Quran even calls him a “word” from God and a spirit from him (Quran 3:45, 4:171). Mary is the only woman named in the Quran, and an entire chapter bears her name (Surah 19). Muslims also expect Jesus to return at the end of time.

The dividing lines, however, are real, and they are not small.

The first difference is who Jesus is. Christians believe he is God the Son, fully God and fully human. Islam teaches that he was a human prophet and messenger, honored above most, but not divine (Quran 4:171, 5:116).

The second is the cross. For Christians, Jesus died on it for the sins of the world. Most Muslims believe he was never crucified at all, and that God instead raised him up to himself (Quran 4:157–158).

That leads to the third difference, the resurrection. For Christians, it is the center of the faith; without it, Paul says, everything else is empty (1 Corinthians 15). Islam doesn’t affirm it, since most Muslims hold that Jesus never died in the first place.

The last is the Trinity. Christians worship one God in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Islam rejects the Trinity as a compromise of God’s absolute oneness.

These are the heart of the Christian creed. It’s true that Muslims honor Jesus. It is not true that they believe the same things about him.

The surprise is the Sufis. Sufism is Islam’s mystical tradition, and its writers fell in love with Jesus. In their poems and stories, he is the model of the inner life: poor, gentle, fasting and close to the heart of God. The collected Muslim sayings of Jesus form the largest body of writing about him in any tradition outside Christianity. The scholar Tarif Khalidi gathered hundreds of them in The Muslim Jesus (2001).

One saying attributed to Jesus in Islamic tradition is carved above the towering gateway of the Mughal emperor Akbar’s city at Fatehpur Sikri, India: the world is a bridge; cross over it, but don’t build your house upon it. Ali, Muhammad’s cousin, described Jesus sleeping with a stone for a pillow, eating rough food and using the moon as his lamp at night. The Persian poet Rumi treated the virgin birth as a picture of the soul’s rebirth, a rebirth that requires silence, poverty and fasting. The great Sufi teacher al-Ghazali filled his masterwork with stories of Jesus.

It’s the same pattern this entire article has been tracing. People who go deep into prayer, fasting and silence, even in another religion, keep finding themselves drawn to Christ. A Christian doesn’t have to accept Sufi theology to notice that. The mystics of both faiths were reaching for the same face. The Christian claim is that he is more than they knew: not only a prophet of the heart, but the one who went to the cross and came back.

Where to start

If something in you is stirring, you don’t need a monastery or a secret teacher. Every practice below is ancient, and you can begin any of them this week. Choose one, not all of them.

1. Read slowly. Try lectio divina, or “divine reading.” Guigo II, a 12th-century monk, described it as a ladder with four rungs: read a short passage, meditate on it, pray it back to God and then rest quietly in it. Five verses read this way can go deeper than five chapters skimmed.
2. Pray at set times. Daniel prayed three times a day (Daniel 6:10), and the Didache instructed Christians to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times daily. Start with morning and evening. The Book of Common Prayer or a Daily Office app will give you the words.
3. Learn the Jesus Prayer. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Say it slowly in rhythm with your breathing, inhaling on the first half and exhaling on the second. Keep it going while you drive, walk or wash the dishes.
4. Sit in silence. “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). Begin with five minutes and no phone. It will feel as though nothing is happening. Keep going anyway.
5. Fast. The early church fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. Begin by skipping one meal and praying through the hunger. If you have a medical condition, consult your doctor first.
6. Come to the table expecting something. Before your next communion, read John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11. Go in looking for Christ instead of going through the motions.
7. Experience the old rites. Attend an Easter Vigil, an Orthodox Divine Liturgy or a service of Evensong. You don’t have to switch churches. Simply let your body learn what ancient worship felt like.
8. Read the mystics. Good first books include:
   • Confessions by Augustine
   • The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence, which is short and simple
   • The Way of a Pilgrim, an anonymous Russian account of learning the Jesus Prayer
   • The Interior Castle by Teresa of Ávila
   • The Cloud of Unknowing, once you’ve read a few of the others
9. Find a guide. Every tradition on these maps assumes you have someone further along the path: a pastor, an elder or a spiritual director. Deep water is safer with a lifeguard.
10. Keep checking the fruit. Use the four questions above. If you’re growing in love, humility and peace, you’re headed the right way.

As far as you seek

Lay all these maps side by side, and they agree on a few things.

• The depths are open to everyone. There is no password, no bloodline and no special class. Teresa’s castle is inside every soul, and the catechumen’s door opens at baptism.
• You set the pace. God invites, but he doesn’t drag. “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find” (Matthew 7:7). Through Jeremiah, he promised to be found by those who seek him with all their heart (Jeremiah 29:13).
• The way down is love, not cleverness. Every mystic in these pages says the same thing. You can memorize every theologian and still circle the outer wall.
• Shallow isn’t worthless. Milk keeps babies alive. The surface-level Christian who barely understands the creed is still in the water, and every saint started there.

So yes, some people live on the shoreline of the faith, while others swim out until they can no longer touch bottom. The tradition’s great surprise is that deep water looks less like power and more like humility. The farther the saints went in, the smaller they felt and the greater God became.

The ocean is the same for everyone. How far out you go is up to you.

Sources

• The Bible: Genesis 14:18 and 28:12; Exodus 20:21 and 30; 1 Kings 3–4, 6 and 11; Psalm 46:10; Jeremiah 29:13; Daniel 6:10; Matthew 5:48, 7:7, 7:16, 12:42, 25:15 and 27:51; Mark 3:22 and 4:10–11; Luke 10:38–42, 12:48, 15 and 24; John 6 and 19:34; Acts 2:13, 8, 19 and 26:24; Romans 16:16; 1 Corinthians 2:14, 3, 8:1, 11, 12:11 and 15; 2 Corinthians 1:22; Ephesians 1:13; Colossians 2:8; Hebrews 5:12–6:1, 6:19, 7 and 9:7–10:20; James 5:14; 2 Peter 1:4; 1 John 4:1; Jude 12; Revelation 7:3, 8:4 and 22:13
• Apostolic Tradition, Wikipedia (on dating and authorship)
• Apostolic Tradition, chapters 15–21 (catechumenate and baptism)
• The Didache, chapters 8–10 (fasting, prayer and the Eucharist)
• Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians, 19 and 20
• Justin Martyr, First Apology, 65–67
• Tertullian, De Corona, 3; On Baptism, 19; and On Idolatry, 9
• Disciplina arcani, Wikipedia
• Disciplina Arcani, An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church
• Origen, On First Principles, Book 4, and Commentary on the Song of Songs, prologue
• John Cassian, Conferences, 14.8
• Pseudo-Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy and The Mystical Theology
• John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent
• Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons on the Song of Songs
• Teresa of Ávila, The Interior Castle (1577)
• Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses
• The Cloud of Unknowing (anonymous, 14th century)
• Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 54
• Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies, Book 1
• Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 8.2.5
• Seal of Solomon, Wikipedia
• Council of Laodicea, Canon 36
• The Quran: 3:45, 4:157–158, 4:171, 5:116 and Surah 19
• Jesus in Islam, Wikipedia
• Tarif Khalidi, The Muslim Jesus (Harvard University Press, 2001)
• Matthew 2:1–12; Herodotus, Histories, Book 1 (on the Magi)
• Marsilio Ficino, Latin translation of the Corpus Hermeticum (1463)
• Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis (1614)
• Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, 900 Theses (1486)
• Johannes Reuchlin, De verbo mirifico (1494)
• 2 Kings 2:19–22; Mark 6:13; Acts 5:15 and 19:11–12
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, sections 1667–1670, 2111 and 2117