Christian Mysticism

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Christian mysticism is the contemplative strand within Christianity that aims at a direct, transforming union with God — an experience its writers describe as immediate rather than inferred, and as a gift more than an achievement. It is not a separate church or doctrine but a way of reading and living the faith that recurs across its history, in monastery and cloister, among theologians and the unlettered alike.

Two great impulses run through the literature, often in the same author. The first is apophatic, or negative: God exceeds every concept the mind can form, so the surest approach is by unsaying — stripping away images and names until what remains is a darkness brighter than any light. This way was given its classic shape around 500 CE by an anonymous Syrian writer who signed himself Dionysius the Areopagite, borrowing the name of a convert mentioned in Acts. His treatises, steeped in late Neoplatonism, taught that the soul rises toward God by leaving knowledge behind; their influence on later contemplatives is hard to overstate. The medieval English author of The Cloud of Unknowing recast the same teaching in plain vernacular: between the soul and God lies a cloud no thought can pierce, crossed only by what he called a naked intent of love.

The second impulse is bridal, or affective: union spoken of as marriage, betrothal, the meeting of lover and beloved, drawing on the Song of Songs. It runs through Bernard of Clairvaux, the Rhineland preacher Meister Eckhart — whose claims about the birth of God in the soul drew condemnation — and reaches its most analytic statement in the sixteenth-century Carmelites Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, who mapped the soul’s ascent through stages of prayer and a purifying “dark night.” These writers insisted that the heights they described were given by grace, not seized by technique.

Scholarship is careful here. It can establish what these authors wrote, the sources they drew on, and how the church received them — Eckhart censured, John of the Cross later named a Doctor of the Church — but not whether the union they reported occurred as described. The very term “mysticism” is a modern coinage; the writers themselves spoke of contemplation, the vision of God, or simply prayer.

The resemblance to other traditions of contemplative union — the Sufi annihilation in God, the Vedāntic identity of self and absolute, the Neoplatonic return of the soul to the One — is real and has been traced for centuries, not least by Dionysius’s own Platonic borrowings. The likeness is worth following. It is not identity: each tradition specifies the union, and its difference from God, in terms the others would dispute. What the Christian mystics held in common was narrower and firmer — that the God met in the depths of prayer was the same God confessed in the creed, and that the meeting changed the one who was met.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912)

→ Related: Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Evelyn Underhill · Unity · Christian Kabbalah