The continuous growth of the New Age movement is one among so many manifestations of the religious return in the form of neo-paganism and gnosis. The New Age proposes a new form of religiosity that, through some of its own manifestations—which we shall analyze—coincides with contemporary religious sentiment.

But what exactly is the New Age? A new religious fashion? An escape from the real world or the projection of a world full of illusion? Is it what some call the return to the Fourth Reich? Or is it rather a new religious mentality that arises in the scientific, cold, and transcendentally meaningless world of the West?

In this piece, I wish to present the general philosophical-theological lines of what the New Age really is and by which signs or characteristics it manifests itself to the people of today.

We Catholic believers must truly come to know these new religious sensibilities that speak of syncretism, deny Christian revelation, and advocate the cult of the self and of numerous falsifications of the true Christian faith.

I. Definition and origin

A. What is the New Age?

The New Age is a set of apparently heteroclite practices, but unified by a vision of total (holistic) humanization: techniques of “expansion of consciousness” and medicine of the soul, astrology or channeling (communication with the entity of the invisible world), control of the body through martial arts and through sensory isolation or harmless therapies; control of nature through floral art, ecology, or vegetarianism. The New Age is a new way of seeing the reality of things. As the very founders of the New Age define it, this movement is “a new paradigm.”

On the other hand, Donald Leonard states that it is an “esoteric and mysterious lake in which the currents of the ’60s flow: ecologists, radical movements, environmentalists, and pacifists.” The New Age movement seeks the liberation of human and cosmic nature from its many ailments and sufferings, not through political or ideological paradigms—although the New Age is in fact linked to the Green party—but through meditation and knowledge. It makes humanity penetrate the level of spiritual-planetary knowledge, in order to enter a “new era” characterized by peace and happiness.

The well-known New Ager Marilyn Ferguson states that the New Age is a “leaderless network that works to bring about radical changes in the United States.” But, according to Franc Rodé, it is a “supermarket of religions where each one takes what he likes and leaves the rest.” And according to sociological surveys, it is a religiosity destined to become a mass phenomenon because of its ambiguity, its force, and its capacity to serve the romanticism and religious sentimentalism of present-day society.

B. Origin and its inspirers

To the question of how the New Age is born, we can answer that it has two principal sources of birth: the Aquarian current with Paul Le Cour, and the Theosophical Society with Alice Bailey, which we shall see later on.

M. F. Jacques defines by the name of “precursors of the Age of Aquarius” the esoteric-occultist currents born in the second half of the 19th century. This esoteric thought deals with the transformation of civilization: each time the sun enters a new zodiacal sign, that is, roughly every 2,160 years. The last transformation that occurred was that of Christianity in the era of Pisces. For this reason, the next great change that will accompany the advent of the Age of Aquarius will correspond to a cataclysm, which will be followed by the coming of a “great King,” the return of the Christ-Aquarius, who will mark the beginning of a new golden age. The new religion, then, will be a Christian and Gnostic esotericism, based on the Gospel of St. John, the true gospel of Aquarius.

Also, Alice Bailey (1880–1949), a disciple of the Theosophical Society, awaited the transition toward a new era in which all religions would be reconciled in the identity of their origins, based on what she called the eternal truth. Bailey developed the Gnostic ideas of Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891), such as the new incarnation of the cosmic Christ. “Mrs. Blavatsky’s theosophical doctrine rests on a scheme of a Gnostic-Neoplatonic type: the essential unity of all, cosmic law (karma), manifestations of the spirit in matter (avatara), and the return of man to the spirit.” A world religion will be created in which God will be similar to the Hindu Brahman, announced by all the avatars, like Christ, era after era. The spirit of the New Age lies in the law of reincarnation, and revelation will be continued by the new Savior or avatar.

II. Characteristics

The principal characteristic of the New Age is its preference for Eastern reflection of a pantheistic style, as a path to living a new religiosity. It advocates a religious system in which God dissolves into the Divine and becomes a “cosmic energy.” God is identified with the ultimate reality of things, especially with the human psyche. The New Age movement seeks the transcendent, and not the sensible, in order to free itself entirely from the earthly, and it unites with cosmic consciousness or collective consciousness. It excludes the notion of creation and rejects every dualistic vision of reality.

It is also a “scientific” vision of reality, based on holism and evolution. The holism of modern physics, which identifies matter with the waves of energy, makes of the universe, according to Fritjof Capra, an “ocean of energy” in which everything is born, participates in the same reality, and is in constant evolution.

As techniques, the New Age adopts music, dance, art in general, martial arts, yoga, Zen Buddhism, mysticism, the search for wisdom in ancient civilizations, magic, drugs, contact with nature (the goddess Gaia), and other methods and techniques. It uses the psychology of Jung (collective consciousness) and the humanistic psychology of Maslow, which is based on the experience of unity with the cosmos.

The New Age seeks a cultural transformation of society, which includes the replacement of all religions in the name of a New Age (just as its own translation in the English language is: new age). This movement also denies the most fundamental truths of the Christian faith, even though it has the Bible as its basic study text, especially the Gospel according to St. John.

III. The faith of the New Age

The New Age expresses an innovative conception of the world (of the cosmos, in its most extensive conception) with the following adjectives:

· holistic (the reality of things is found in the Whole),

· ecological (the goddess Gaia is Mother Earth, who must be worshiped),

· androgynous (the world is a union of the masculine and the feminine),

· mystical (the divine belongs to a Whole),

· global (collective consciousness).

In the New Age movement, one passes from simple faith to the Gnostic or hidden beliefs, from religion to spirituality, from prayer-as-supplication to prayer-as-mantra, from obedience to experience… The faith is founded on an esoteric-mystical spirituality, in which unity is sought through a totalizing vision of the reality of things. Also promoted is a complex of techniques to explore the sources of Being and of the One, in which the narcissism of the ego is reinforced.

In the faith of the New Age there is a sense of profound existential emptiness and of an unfulfilled divine desire, in which the reasons for living are sought. The spiritual is identified with the emotional, the cult of oneself appears, and there exists a pagan mysticism in which a nameless divinity is worshiped.

According to the New Age, the world moves “toward a greater unity” (in the words of Teilhard de Chardin). Cosmogenesis, or the organization of matter into ever more diversified agglomerations, with the passage of time produces biogenesis, or life on earth. Life creates the biosphere, which develops into more complex forms until reaching the creation of the brain. Here we meet anthropogenesis, the ascent toward man. Man is the final result, above all the beings of the universe. For this reason, man is a person insofar as he is a consciousness thinking about itself. Then a development of a cosmic level originates: consciousness is not only life, but reflection. Thus, unity attains absolute dominion over its own evolution and can decide about itself. Subsequently, man evolves toward noogenesis, or the genesis of the spirit, creating a new era of light and love.

The planetary objective of the New Age is the creation of a true and proper nervous system of the new humanity: the world scientific community (world education). This is the transformation of the Age of Aquarius that will lead us to the Omega, which is the total and totalizing reality, the prime mover of human activity that possesses universal dimensions. It is also incorruptible, transcendent, unifying; it is divine Love.

Gnosis and reason are related to each other, and this is due to a fundamental doubt regarding the capacity of reason and of modern consciousness to answer the deepest questions of man. The objective of the New Age neo-Gnostics is to mend the rift that purely rationalist knowledge (positivism and atheistic materialism) has produced in a world that is still disillusioned and without hope.

The weekly NEWSWEEK published not long ago an analysis of the spiritual and religious inclinations in the United States, indicating that the law of supply and demand and commercial tricks are already being applied to the various Christian religious communities.

In this way the law of the market makes the effectiveness of a Protestant pastor or of a Catholic priest be measured not by his faithful example toward the Sacred Scriptures or by his own preaching, but by the number of people who come to church and by the amount of dollars collected in the religious ceremonies. Thus, for religion to be convincing, it will have to observe the “quality prescriptions” proper to a competitive market, because apparently that is what it is about: winning clientele. NEWSWEEK notes three:

1. It presents itself like a restaurant menu. The various confessions and churches offer doctrines from which each person chooses, according to his tastes. It is not a matter of belonging to a particular faith, but of making it to measure, choosing a bit of this religion and a bit of the other.

2. Religiosity understood as feeling, sentiment. There is no interest in religious formation or in deepening in the faith or in the foundations proper to religion. The beliefs that are accepted are superficial and do not demand a committing adherence to any religion in particular.

3. Easy religion. It is a religiosity based on an intense social life, with a view to satisfying the religious sentiment proper to all men.

On the other hand, the Creed of the New Age is ambiguous and seeks the satisfaction of all tastes and spiritual measures to choose from. Evidently, it possesses “dogmas” or doctrinal guidelines, although they are not upheld as such, and these are what ground its Creed:

1. Radical rejection of the philosophy and religion of the “Old Age,” the Ancient Era. This means a frontal opposition to Judeo-Christian civilization. It promotes the pagan religions (Celtic rites, Germanic mythology…).

2. It confronts the dualism created by the West called “God and man,” holding that humanity is one, that nature and humanity are a single reality, that the Universe and God are one.

3. It proposes the free examination of the perception of reality, in which each one interprets the religions and the existential reality that surrounds them as he wishes, over against the religious dogmatism of the traditional religions.

4. It preaches the Age of Aquarius, which theoretically will bring us an era of harmony and cosmic peace throughout the Third Millennium. Thus a new religion will be born, under the coming of a liberating Christ-Aquarius.

Faced with this Creed, we encounter another reality, and it is the palpable fact of the dizzying expansion of the New Age throughout the entire globe: multiple seminars, an endless number of courses, magazines, and bookstores. Specifically, some 50,000 New Age centers and bookstores have been created which, with diverse images and signs, are reproduced everywhere, marketing all kinds of objects, plants, and various curiosities. There currently exist more than 100,000 books published on any subject that develops New Age thought, as if it were a written apostolate. In addition to having numerous supermarkets and pharmacies specialized in New Age foods (ecological, vegetarian, relaxation foods…) and alternative medicine.

Conclusion

I have given a brief explanation of the Age of Aquarius, of the New Age. Due to the time factor it has not been a complete or exhaustive explanation. This could be done in a Seminar on this topic. There is indeed abundant bibliography. Precisely in a collection directed by Msgr. González, a work of mine will be published on the New Age and its current relationship with Christianity.

Throughout this lecture we have walked along the path of the New Age. We now know the basic ideas of New Age spirituality, what its fundamental characteristics are, and how it manifests itself to the man and woman of the 21st century. But a question arises that troubles me: how can we live our Catholic religion in the face of the irremediable influence of this new syncretic, esoteric, and occultist movement?

On the one hand, it is fitting to recognize that the Age of Aquarius proposes to us an ambiguous vision of the world in the spiritual and religious realms. Intrinsically, it is a response to the questions and to the thirst for transcendence of present-day man. But the water that the New Age presents is non-potable water, contaminated by the pagan, the Gnostic, and the syncretic.

On the other hand, John Paul II insists on a new evangelization that surpasses the New Age, and also all the new religious movements called “sects.”

It is urgent to defend the faith against these new de-Christianizing conceptions. I consider that such a defense consists in effecting a reinforcement of Christian identity, in binding anew the authentic relationship between faith and works (praxis), faith and Christian life, and a vital awareness of that to which we pray and in which we as Christians believe. It consists in strengthening our Christian beliefs, basically from the reflection on the Creed of our Catholic faith, completed through a profound catechesis and from the living out of personal faith, one that succeeds in leading every believer into the authentic path of the itinerarium Dei. Catechesis is destined to carry out this evangelizing function, in the face of the present-day world, which needs to give answers to the disquieting questions of human existence.

In this sense, Francesc Torralba states: “There is a rediscovery of the invisible dimension of the human being, of the Augustinian interioritas. (…) After the eclipse of God that characterized the 20th century, contemporary man seems to open himself, from multiple perspectives, to the Kingdom of the Spirit, to the sphere of the sacred, but he lacks pedagogues, spiritual masters.”

And we can add: Such pedagogues or spiritual masters we find in Edith Stein, John Henry Newman, Thérèse of Lisieux, von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac, Teresa of Calcutta… and so many others. These 20th-century Christian thinkers and witnesses offer us their particular spirituality, matured after personal experience with the God who is Love, and after the hard blows of life. They present us with a catechesis from the coherent living out of the faith, carried even to the extreme of giving their lives heroically, like Edith Stein when she died in the gas chamber of Auschwitz in 1942. There is an urgent need for a new proclamation of the Gospel, enthusiastic and with clear conviction, without fear, constantly listening within ourselves to the hope-filled message of Pope Wojtyła: “Open the doors of your hearts to Christ.”

Source: Conoze.com