Philosophy

Christian Mysticism

The contemplative strand within Christianity that seeks direct, transforming union with God — reached, its writers held, through love and a knowing that passes beyond images and words.

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. The union it seeks is not a special revelation set against the ordinary means of salvation; it is held to be the inner depth of those means — baptism, the eucharist, scripture, prayer — opened from within. The contemplative is, on this account, only doing fully what every believer does in part.

The very word arrives late. “Mystical” descends from the Greek mystikos, “hidden,” and in the early Church named the concealed sense of scripture and the inner reality of the rites before it ever named a person’s interior states. The abstract noun “mysticism” was coined in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, frequently by critics; the writers gathered under it spoke instead of contemplation, the vision of God, the union of the soul with the Word, or simply prayer. To read them well is to hear those older words under the modern label — a point the parent concept, mysticism, works out in full.

Two impulses

Two great currents run through the literature, often braided 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 received its classic Christian shape around the year 500 from an anonymous writer, almost certainly a Syrian monk steeped in late Neoplatonism, who signed his treatises with the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of the Apostle Paul named in Acts. The pseudonym lent the work quasi-apostolic authority for a millennium; in 1895 the philologists Josef Stiglmayr and Hugo Koch independently showed, from its dependence on the pagan Neoplatonist Proclus, that the corpus could not predate the late fifth century. The borrowed name did not diminish the books. The Mystical Theology teaches that the soul ascends to God by leaving knowledge behind, climbing past both the affirmations and the denials of theology into a darkness that is also a superabundant light; its influence is woven through everything that follows, the taproot of Christian apophatic theology. The corpus passed west through the ninth-century Latin of John Scotus Eriugena, was glossed by the Victorines and by Thomas Aquinas, and surfaced again, in plain English, in the fourteenth century, when the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing recast the teaching for unlettered contemplatives: between the soul and God lies a cloud no thought can pierce, beneath which the seeker must press a “cloud of forgetting” down over every created thing, crossing the dark by what the author calls a naked intent of love. That same English writer also translated the Mystical Theology into his vernacular, under the title Dionise Hid Divinitie, fixing the genealogy in a single hand.

The second impulse is bridal, or affective: union spoken of as marriage, betrothal, the meeting of lover and beloved, read out of the Song of Songs. Here the knowing is itself a kind of loving. Its twelfth-century fountainhead is Bernard of Clairvaux, whose eighty-six Sermons on the Song of Songs — begun in Advent 1135 and left unfinished at his death in 1153, having reached only the third chapter of the Song — read the Bride as the soul and the Bridegroom as the Word, and map the ascent through three kisses: of the feet (penitence), of the hand (progress), and of the mouth (contemplative union). For Bernard the Song is opened not by argument but by experientia, lived experience; only those who have loved can construe the song of love. His close friend William of St. Thierry gave the same nuptial spirituality a more systematic trinitarian form, coining the formula amor ipse intellectus est — love itself is a kind of understanding. Both men were careful to specify the union as unitas spiritus, a unity of will in which the human and divine wills coincide in a single act of loving, and expressly not unitas substantiae, a fusion of being: the creature does not become God by nature. That safeguard, grounded in Paul’s word that whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him, would police the bridal tradition for centuries against the charge of pantheism.

The affective way reaches its most analytic statement in the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelites Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and John of the Cross (1542–1591). Teresa, in The Interior Castle, figures the soul as a castle of seven mansions through which the seeker passes inward to the innermost chamber where the spiritual marriage is consummated; she was canonized in 1622 and, in 1970, named by Paul VI the first woman declared a Doctor of the Church. John, her younger collaborator in the reform of the order, wrote four works that pair a poem with a long commentary — the Ascent of Mount Carmel, the Dark Night, the Spiritual Canticle, and the Living Flame of Love — charting a double purification of sense and of spirit through the desolation he named the dark night of the soul, a stripping that is the negative way lived in the nerves rather than argued in the schools. Canonized in 1726, he was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1926 under the title Mystical Doctor. In the Carmelite synthesis the two impulses fuse: the apophatic ascent past all images becomes the very means of the bridal union, and the darkness is the marriage bed.

The women mystics and the vernacular flowering

The thirteenth century carried contemplation out of the Latin cloister and into the vernaculars, largely through women, and largely outside formal religious orders. The Beguines — laywomen of the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and northern France who took no permanent vows, supported themselves by their own work, and answered to no abbess — produced some of the first sustained theology written in a European spoken tongue. Beguine mysticism finds its supreme literary voice in Hadewijch of Brabant, whose Middle Dutch Visions, letters, and songs reconfigure the courtly vocabulary of minne — Love — into a theology in which Love is by turns God, Christ, and the storm of longing she calls orewoet. The Saxon convent of Helfta, by contrast, was learned, Latinate, and liturgical: there Mechthild of Magdeburg, Gertrude the Great, and Mechthild of Hackeborn produced a visionary spirituality saturated in the Mass and the Office, and a devotion to the wounded Heart of Christ that became a root of later Sacred-Heart piety — a current treated under medieval women’s mysticism.

The freedom of this lay theology met the institution’s suspicion. The Beguine Marguerite Porete refused to withdraw her Mirror of Simple Souls, a dialogue in which the soul, “annihilated” in God, returns to the uncreated being it had in God before creation and so passes beyond the rule of the very virtues; she was burned in Paris on 1 June 1310. Sixteen months later the Council of Vienne condemned the Beguine status itself and, in the decree Ad nostrum, codified the so-called heresy of the Free Spirit in eight articles, two of which paraphrase Porete’s book almost verbatim. Her case marks the boundary the medieval Church drew around vernacular mystical speech, especially in a woman’s hand. The doctrine did not die with her. Read alongside the propositions later extracted from Meister Eckhart, the Mirror shows the same speculative tradition pursued in two idioms, condemned in two bulls, and surviving in both.

Regional schools

Rhineland mysticism is the German-speaking flowering of the same speculative current, gathered above all around Meister Eckhart (c. 1260–1328), the Dominican master who preached, in his own vernacular, the birth of the Word in the ground (grunt) of the soul, a detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) so radical that it empties the self of created content, and a “little spark” in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable. His boldest formulations drew a posthumous condemnation: the bull In agro dominico, issued by John XXII at Avignon on 27 March 1329, judged seventeen of twenty-eight extracted propositions heretical and eleven ill-sounding, while noting that Eckhart had submitted before his death — so that the articles, not the man, stood condemned. His Dominican disciples Johannes Tauler and Heinrich Suso carried the teaching into a more pastoral key for the lay devotional networks called the Friends of God; the fifteenth-century cardinal Nicholas of Cusa took it up in his learned doctrine of the coincidence of opposites; and the anonymous Theologia Germanica distilled it into a treatise that Martin Luther later printed and prized. Eckhart’s vernacular afterlife runs straight into the Protestant mysticism of Jacob Boehme and the radical Reformation, and his speculative ground would echo, centuries on, in idealist philosophy and in the modern study of the subject.

To the east of the Greek world, Syriac Christian mysticism developed a contemplative literature of remarkable interior subtlety — Isaac of Nineveh, John of Dalyatha, Joseph Hazzaya — independent in vocabulary and temper from the Latin and Greek streams, mapping the stages of solitary prayer and the luminous vision of the heart in a Semitic theological grammar of its own. Within Eastern Orthodox Christianity the central contemplative tradition is hesychasm, the practice of inner stillness (hēsychia) built around the ceaseless invocation of the name of Jesus — the Jesus Prayer — and the descent of the mind into the heart. Its roots lie in the desert fathers, Evagrius Ponticus, and the Macarian homilies; its dogmatic charter is the work of Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), who, defending the Athonite monks against the philosopher Barlaam of Calabria, distinguished the divine essence, which remains forever beyond participation, from the divine energies — light, glory, grace — which are God himself, uncreated, and genuinely shared by the saints. The Constantinopolitan synods of 1341, 1347, and 1351 vindicated him; the 1782 Philokalia gathered the whole corpus and carried it, through its Slavonic Dobrotolyubie, into the Russian spiritual revival.

The scholarly caveat

Scholarship is careful at the threshold. It can establish what these authors wrote, the sources they drew on, the manuscripts that carried them, and how the church received them — Eckhart’s articles censured, Porete burned, John of the Cross later named a Doctor — but not whether the union they reported occurred as described. The discipline reads the texts and the receptions; the reported meeting in the depth of prayer lies on the far side of what documents can reach. That limit is not a verdict against the mystics but the proper shape of the inquiry, and the better historians keep it in view rather than smuggling a judgment past it.

Texts and scholarship

The primary literature is now largely available in critical editions and in older translations that have entered the public domain. The Greek and Latin Corpus Areopagiticum is printed in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca (vols. III–IV, Paris, 1857), with the standard pre-modern English in John Parker’s The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (London: James Parker, 1897–99), hosted in the Library. Bernard’s Sermones super Cantica stand in Patrologia Latina 183, Englished in Samuel J. Eales’s Cantica Canticorum: Eighty-Six Sermons on the Song of Solomon (London: Elliot Stock, 1895). The Latin Eckhart was recovered by Heinrich Denifle in the Archiv für Litteratur- und Kirchengeschichte des Mittelalters II (1886); the German is edited by Franz Pfeiffer, Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts II (Leipzig: Göschen, 1857), and rendered into English by C. de B. Evans (London: Watkins, 1924) — a translation that, resting on Pfeiffer’s uncritical text, carries forward material now judged spurious, including the Schwester Katrei treatise. Marguerite Porete’s Mirror survives in a single Old French witness (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 157); the trial documents are transcribed in Paul Fredericq, Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae (Ghent–The Hague, 1889–1906), and the relevant canon law in Emil Friedberg’s Corpus Iuris Canonici (Leipzig, 1879–81). The Cloud of Unknowing was edited by Evelyn Underhill (London: Watkins, 1912).

The modern study of the field begins with W. R. Inge’s Bampton Lectures, Christian Mysticism (London: Methuen, 1899; CCEL), and with Evelyn Underhill’s Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness (London: Methuen, 1911; CCEL), the two works that fixed the subject in English. Its standard reference is now Bernard McGinn’s multivolume The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York: Crossroad, 1991– ), whose successive volumes — The Foundations of Mysticism, The Growth of Mysticism, The Flowering of Mysticism — narrate the tradition from its origins through the fourteenth century. Denys Turner’s The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) traces the apophatic line from Dionysius through Eckhart, and Andrew Louth’s The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. 2007) sets out its late-antique foundations. Where these authors compare the Christian way with the contemplative paths of other traditions, the comparison itself is handled under comparative mysticism.

What held this strand together across fifteen centuries was never a single technique or a shared map of the ascent — the desert hesychast counting the name of Jesus into his breath, the Rhineland preacher emptying the ground of the soul, the Carmelite enduring the dark night, the Beguine annihilated in Love worked methods that diverge sharply and were sometimes condemned in each other’s company. What held was a conviction about where the road led: that the God reached in the silence beyond images is the same God confessed in the creed and received in the bread, and that the soul who reaches him does not contemplate a stranger but is brought home to the One in whose image it was made — and, in the reaching, is remade.

→ In the library: The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899) · The Cloud of Unknowing (Underhill, 1912) · The Divine Cloud (Collins, 1871) · The Cell of Self-Knowledge (Gardner, 1910)

Sources

Underhill 1911
McGinn 1991
Turner 1995
Louth 2007