Mysticism is on the rise as a topic of cultural interestand as a part of the burgeoning interest in “spirituality” that has defined the cultural temperament of our times. This shift has had a predictable effect on the kinds of students enrolling in mainline Protestant seminaries, as well on as the interests they bring. All this would have surprised faculty members of an earlier generation. If mysticism was touched upon at all in the seminary curriculum of, say, 1980, it was a topic left to the historians; survey courses in systematic theology generally would not have ventured into such arcane territory. When referred to, sources categorized as mystical—for example, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich—were relegated to a shaky status at the fringes of theology; the “real” theological contributors included such great scholastics as Anselm, Aquinas, and Bonaventure. The textbooks used during this period illustrate the point: Williston Walker's standard History of the Christian Church, which appeared in its first edition in 1918 and was in steady use in many theological schools, was significantly revised by a team of historians from Union Theological Seminary only for the fourth edition of 1985. Until that time, the narrative focus moved rather quickly from an exploration of Christian origins and the early fathers to the great Protestant reformers with a relatively cursory overview of the Middle Ages and almost no reference to medieval mystics.¹

Over the last generation, things have changed dramatically. Medieval studies as a discipline has acquired a prominent place in the theological curriculum as a development shaped in part by the rising interest in spirituality. Seminars in mysticism, while not yet commonplace and certainly not a curricular requirement, are not unusual. Students enrolling in such classes bring an expectation that mystical sources will speak to their “soul hunger” and address issues related to spiritual formation. Faculty members teaching in a range of departments, such as the history of Christianity, systematic theology, and ministry studies, have also broadened the scope of their theological interests during the past quarter century, focusing on a range of topics—including mysticism—that were previously ignored. George Lindbeck noticed the significance ofthese shiftsin The Nature ofDoctrine: Religion and Doctrine in a Post-Liberal Age, observing that what he called the “experiential-expressivism” had come to dominate “most theological schools and departments of religious studies.”²

This growing interest in mysticism has become part of the theological diet to satisfy the experientialist hungers of a new generation. As graduate programs have begun to focus increasing attention on this phenomenon, the ranks of those engaged in the study of mysticism has grown, and the number of historians and theologians interested in mysticism has increased. Bernard McGinn has been a central influence over these transitions and has shared his fascination with medieval Christian mysticism with a generation of graduate students at the University of Chicago. His contribution to this field is difficult to overestimate, not only because of his role in shaping a generation of faculty, but also due to his publication during the last fifteen years of a series of weighty volumes entitled The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism.

In the first volume of the series, The Foundations of Mysticism, McGinn offers an overview of the historical roots of western Christian mysticism, explores its birth, and concludes with a lengthy appendix probing the theoretical foundations of the modern study of mysticism. This fascinating and wide-ranging section chronicles the modern debate over the nature and meaning of mysticism, an overview that he admits is eclectic and personal. What emerges from this discussion is McGinn's conviction, echoing the work of Ernst Troeltsch and Friedrich von Hügel, that mysticism does not constitute an isolated intellectual phenomenon, since it exists within the Christian tradition as “one element in concrete religious life.”³

This claim, if correct, suggests that historical introductions to medieval Christianity that ignore mystical theology are insufficient if not misleading. One might even go further to suggest, as McGinn implies, that current constructions of Christian faith and life bereft of the “depth” insight of the mystics lacks something not simply important but essential.

Throughout this series, McGinn situates mysticism constructively as a vital attribute of Christians' theological understandingand notes the contribution such sources have made to what he refers to as the “intuitive/emotional” dimensions of human experience. Following von Hügel, he also contends that the mystical cannot find proper expression without the active engagement of the other constitutive dimensions of religion: the historical/institutional and the rational/analytical. In other words, the mystical is essential but not sufficient as a constitutive dimension of Christian theological thought. In elaborating this point, McGinn makes the important observation that “[n]o mystics believedin or practiced ‘mysticism.’ They believed in and practiced Christianity (or Judaism, or Islam, or Hinduism), that is, religions that contained mystical elements as parts of a wider historical whole…. It is important to remember that mysticism is always a process or a way of life.” This conviction guides the detailed analysis of sources in this and the subsequent three volumes that have thus far appeared: The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the Twelfth Century (1994); The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism—1200–1350 (1998); and, most recently, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (2005).

In this fourth volume of the series, McGinn explores what he construes as the background for the German sources in question and focuses on the early Dominicans Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Although they were not mystics, properly speaking, McGinn regards these men as significant because of their influence on subsequent generations of theologians, including Meister Eckhart and his followers. As Aquinas wrote, “it is a greater thing to hand on to others what has been contemplated than merely to contemplate,”⁴

an attitude that McGinn identifies as essential to the mission of the early Dominicans. This claim also provides insight into McGinn's conviction that mystical theology in the Middle Ages must be read as a tradition with binding force across generations through the direct impact of teaching as well as the living “voice” of texts transmitted in monasteries and other religious communities. In an aside with more than merely historical significance, McGinn surmises that “the Angelic Doctor [Aquinas] believed that all Christians were called to be contemplatives,”⁵ a view echoed a generation ago by Karl Rahner in his oft-quoted declaration that “Christians ofthe future willbe mystics or they will not exist at all.” These are ambitious and provocative claims, to be sure, suggesting that the recent flurry of interest in mysticism may be more than a passing fancy.

One of the difficulties involved in a survey of the sort that McGinn here undertakes has to do with how we might distinguish between mystics, properly speaking, and those who write about mystical theology. McGinn recognizes that such a distinction complicates every attempt to specify exactly what mysticism was in the Middle Ages, or any other period, and who precisely should be named among the ranks of those whose theological interests were shaped by spiritual or mystical concerns. A further challenge which McGinn recognizes has to do with the difficulty of speaking with any precision about mystical experience in the context of this period. McGinn's definition of mysticism as “involving animmediate consciousness of the presence of God” is complicated by several factors: first, his use of the term “consciousness” introduces a notion not reflected in premodern sources; second, what constitutes an “immediate” experience is not altogether clear and may be influenced not only by matters of personal subjectivity but also by questions of social status, institutional access, and power; and third, the category of “presence”is difficult to apply to mystical theologians whose interest is in the absence of God. In the most recent volume, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, McGinn devotes considerable energy to sorting through such conundrums.

The heart of this volume, devoted to Eckhart and his students Henry Suso and John Tauler, develops an earlier monograph of McGinn's, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing.⁶

Here, of course, the question about God's “presence” becomes central, since the “apophatic”interests of these authors focus persistently on absence, silence, emptiness, or what Eckhart calls “the quiet desert” as the truest sense of the divine. His favored term, “ground,” or “ground ofthe soul,” moves beyond the question of presence, andis an “experience” only in a sense opposite that normally attributed to the word in contemporary usage. Thus, Eckhart writes: “Now know…that a person must penetrate and transcend everything created and temporal and all being and go into the ground that has no ground.”⁷ Such claims define his thought and may suggest that theologians of this sort were actually concerned to break beyond every notion of experience itself. This argument, boldly articulated by Denys Turner in The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, suggests that we read such mystical texts as anti-experiential. Their intentions, Turner argues, are deliberately hostile to the fascination of modern readers whose hungers are fueled by experientialist interests. Turner suggests that the relevance of medieval mysticism, at least in a trajectory of interpreters from Augustine to Bonaventure, Eckhart, Denys the Carthusian, and John of the Cross, lies precisely in “its rejection of ‘mystical experience,’ and [in] locat[ing] the mystical firmly within the grasp of the ordinary and the everyday.”⁸

McGinn recognizes this in his discussion of these sources, suggesting that “the mystical sense of the divine absence, such as the desert of Eckhart, provides a point of contact between classical Christian mysticism and the wasteland of modern atheism.”⁹

This is surely right, although one might well carry the point further in interpreting the origins of this contemporary “wasteland” as a constructive negation of the neatly managed and, for increasing numbers of disenchanted, untenable theisms of modernity. If this is a valid reading of cultural developments, it suggests that we read Nietzsche not simply as an outraged critic of Christianity but as a secular prophet bent on exposing the malaise of the modern church. The problem of secularization viewed from Nietzsche's perspective is not only that “God is dead,” but also that “we have killed him.”¹⁰ Thus, as McGinn argues in the opening pages of the series's “general introduction,” it may well be that if “the challenge of secularism has marginalized religion for many in the modern world, it has also provided the occasion for others to discover profounder depths in their religious traditions.”¹¹ The quest of mysticism represents one of the invitations toward these depths, which are not somehow esoteric or remote from our awareness. As the poet Richard Wilbur once suggested, “All that we do/ Is touched with ocean, yet we remain/ On the shore of what we know.”¹²

McGinn recognizes that Michel de Certeau (d. 1986) pointed to the same phenomenon in identifying the seventeenth century as the decisive turning point in the broad trajectory of western Christian mysticism.¹³

This was the watershed moment marked by a new interest in what de Certeau called “experimental knowledge” of the divine, a form of knowing that had slowly and steadily begun to detach itself from “traditional theology or Church institutions”—in other words, personal mysticism divorced from the burden of ecclesiastical traditions. This has some affinity to the widespread phenomenon of late-modern persons disenchanted with “organized religion” who confess that they are “spiritual, but not religious.” But something is lost in such a posture, and for McGinn this represents an untenable loss. Detaching the mystical from the ordinary rhythms of religious life and institutional involvement means that it can no longer function as the depth sounding of existing theological traditions. Not only does it withhold a “depth” dimension from the tradition, but it leaves the mystic alienated from community and expressive of a private if also intensely-felt subjectivity. Taken to an extreme, this would lead not necessarily to Enoch Emery's “Church Without Christ” in Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood,¹⁴ but to a church without Christians. Such an eviscerated mysticism is finally all soul and no body.

In The Harvest of Mysticism, McGinn explores the breadth of mystical sources by including genres other than strictly theological writing. He devotes considerable attention here to poetry and letters, sermons and hagiographical texts, and includes several images from illuminated manuscripts in order to remind us of the “visual culture” of mystic theologians. Although an admittedly slim sampling from what one presumes to be a much wider selection, the illustrations he includes and interprets articulate what he calls a “new iconography of mystical erotics,”¹⁵

one based on the conviction that “external images could be used to trigger internal states of consciousness of God.”¹⁶ Throughout this volume, McGinn reminds us that we misread such materials if we interpret them narrowly as technical or scientific manuals, since they behave more like poems in “maintain[ing] a surplus of meaning in their original form that resists translation and that often remains partly hidden to outsiders.”¹⁷

Itis precisely this poetic character that renders such mysticaltexts and traditions of discourse largely inaccessible to those who expect theology to offer a manageable rationality. Interpreting these texts properly requires that we distinguish, recalling Heidegger's terminology, between “calculative” and “meditative” thinking.¹⁸

Like poems, and to some extent images, such sources ask to be pondered, refusing to be exhausted in a literal reading—and demanding to be interpreted not only for what but also how they “mean.” Recalling Keats's notion of “negative capability,” they invite us to think and to live amid “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”¹⁹ Mystical texts of the Eckhartian pedigree that McGinn explores in this volume assume such a posture, and in their very form invite us into the texture of an unknowing—or, as he puts it citing the French philosopher Jacques Maritain, a “no-ing.”²⁰ In the words of Eckhart, “What is the last end? It is the hidden darkness of the eternal divinity, and it is unknown, and it was never known, and it will never be known. God remains there within himself, unknown.”²¹

All of this suggests, at the very least, that this broad tradition of Germanic mysticism stands as a healthy antidote to the triumphalist religious epistemologies, which seem to constitute so much of contemporary Christian rhetoric. McGinn is intent on introducing such sources as of both historical and constructive importance, which is to say, as “tradition” in the strong sense. He writes with the same passionate conviction that animates his teaching and contends that such mystical sources might well challenge and elevate late-modern sensibilities, at least among those for whom “God” is not an object to be managed through theological argument or apologetic debate, but rather the Other whom the poet Ellen Hinsey describes in The White Fire of Time as “Center of utterance, but unreachable/ With voice—compass and goal—Shore towards which all/ Telling rows.”²²

The “God” of Eckhart, and of McGinn for that matter, demands what he calls “a form of intellectual ascesis designed to prepare for the unknowing that alone makes God present to us.”²³ How are we to understand such a paradoxical claim? Well, for starters, as paradox, that endangered dimension of thought standing against the tides of a muscular religious sensibility that dominates public religious discourse, which eschews ambiguity and has little tolerance for mystery. Paradox, after all, lies at the heart of the mystical, which in this respect shares something with artistic expression. Mystical theology is “not a version of the facts,” to extend a claim recently made by the writer Jeanette Winterson,²⁴ but rather, like poetry and fiction, is “an entirely different way of seeing.” It unravels premature theological or metaphysical certainties. It insists that God is “other” than the conceptions shaped by the fervent literalisms of both the “right” and the “left” ends of the spectrum. It invites us, in McGinn's description of Eckhart's project, toward a “this-worldly mysticism” arrived at through a “mystical atheism.”²⁵ This will not suit those who demand absolutes and refuse paradox, who will be confused or scandalized by Eckhart's claim that “as long as the soul has God, knows God, and is aware of God, she is far from God.”²⁶

But what if paradox lies at the heart of the theological endeavor, as suggested by Eckhart and many of those who constitute what McGinn calls the “harvest of mysticism” in medieval Germany? What if “a form of intellectual ascesis,” as McGinn puts it in a paraphrase of Eckhart, is essential “to prepare for the unknowing that alone makes God present to us”? What if the apophatic discipline of the mystics—i.e., the habit of recognizing that God is not this, and not that— represents a “deconstruction that leads to silent union”? Such language will baffle and even irritate those intolerant of ambiguity, whose religious quest is shaped by an insistence upon what David Hume called “clear and certain truths.” But it will entice others who have gazed into the complex and apparently uncontrollable texture of this life and find themselves unsatisfied by blinding assertions and hungry for “the very strong negative and therapeutic element” of mystical apophasis, as Don Cupitt recently put it.²⁷

It is for such reasons that McGinn interprets particular aspects of German mysticism, and particularly its apophatic strains, as holding an attraction for late-modern Christians who find themselves unsatisfied by the diet of conventional pieties and yearn for a theology with “expressive/experiential” depths.

In the finalpages of Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, Reverend Ames remarks that “love…is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality.”²⁸

Even Dan Brown's Marie Chauvel comes close to such wisdom, in the final scene from The Da VinciCode in conceding that the beauty of the grail“liesin her ethereal nature,” whichis finally that of being “a glorious unattainable treasure that somehow, even in today's world of chaos, inspires us.”²⁹ In other words, the whole point of the quest is for no-thing. Eckhart might have said as much. The apophatic way may always remain a minority report, since such “no-ing” willnot—and probably should not—satisfy the taste of the masses. Von Hügel, Rahner, and McGinn may be wrong in asserting that mysticism's constructive significance lies in affirming the “God beyond God,” and in asserting as Eckhart does that the soul “comes to knowledge that God is unlike every nature” and thereby attains “a state of amazement…and comes into a state of silence.”³⁰ But if they are right, then what we do not say, and how we do not speak, are at least as important as our theological declarations and doctrinal certainties, and these mystical sources are not only viable but crucial in coming to know, as Eckhart put it, that “God is a word, a word unspoken.”³¹ If such silence is an important dimension of all true theology, then the fruit of McGinn's magisterial efforts in The Presence of God might well be of more than antiquarian interest for professional historians, and it may have a poignant relevance for those like Reverend Ames who find themselves charged week in and week out with the vocation of living and proclaiming this word.