A Review of the Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology
Edward Howells and Mark A. McIntosh, eds., Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2020).
The first Sunday after Easter we opened our church service with the words from John’s Gospel: “Have you believed, Thomas, because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe” (20:29 NRSV). In these words, the Gospel writer recognizes that there is a distinction between the first generation of believers and subsequent generations, between those who saw the risen Lord and those who hear their testimony and believe in the risen Lord. The first generation bore witness to what they heard, what they saw with their eyes, what they looked at and touched with their hands, concerning the word of life. Later generations receive that witness, the foundational truth of the church, that Jesus who lived in Nazareth and was crucified in Jerusalem is alive. The public truth is that Jesus was crucified; the church’s witness is that Jesus rose from the dead.[1]
Despite John’s blessing of those who believe without seeing, there is a long tradition in the history of the church of people seeking to see God, of people seeking a beatific vision. The writings about their hope and their quest for union with God are often referred to as the mystical tradition. This kind of quest to see the face of God is encouraged by some biblical writers, even as others put it outside the realm of human experience. Matthew reminds us that Jesus proclaimed that the pure in heart would see God, and 1 John gives the vision of God as the hope of faithful believers. Exodus and John both exclude the possibility: God is hidden, and Jesus has made God visible.[2] In some ways, this ambiguity lays the foundation for the complex theological conversation that has developed throughout Christian history.
There is also a wide tradition in the contemporary Christian church of those who bear witness to their new experience of God as the foundation for their belief—this might be referred to as the charismatic or, perhaps more broadly, the holiness tradition. It is most commonly, though not exclusively, found in Pentecostal churches. People from this tradition speak as though they regularly speak with God, hear God, and see God at work in their day-to-day lives in unusual and sometimes spectacular ways. Their witness is that Jesus is very much alive and at work in the world through the Spirit.
Neither the mystical tradition nor the Pentecostal tradition, however, have been considered mainstream Christianity. It is as though the majority of Christians have believed, with John, that belief without seeing or hearing will be the usual pattern. And many Christians expect to see God at work not in unusual and spectacular ways, but in the slow transformation of people as they practice love of God and neighbor. But this mainstream position is being challenged in our current context, as a growing number of Pentecostal churches, especially in the majority world, has brought religious experience into new prominence. Likewise, in the Western secular world, there seems to be an increased willingness among people to consider questions of spirituality, though not necessarily religion. So given these traditions and recent changes, how should we talk about religious experience? How is our experience shaped? How do we distinguish between general and Christian spirituality? And where does careful discourse about religious experience matter for Christians in the twenty-first century?
The recently published Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology, edited by Edward Howells and Mark A. McIntosh, offers many helpful resources for reflection on such conversations. It is a compendium of thirty-three essays by as many authors, which are presented under four general themes: definitions of key terms and ideas, practices that nurture mystical theology, key patterns of theological thinking within the mystical tradition, and connections to other more typical theological topics. Using these four categories, the authors of the individual essays offer a discussion of Christian religious experience, providing additional reading suggestions as well as useful bibliographies in the primary and secondary literature.
Readers coming to these essays will undoubtedly select essays that matter for the particular questions they bring to the text—one doesn’t need to read the book as a whole. If readers are novices in the field, they may find all the essays helpful; if they are advanced readers, they may want to consider the arguments of particular essays. The essays are helpful introductions, for the most part written in accessible language, but they also interact with the literature of their field, making an argument. In this way, the book is a good handbook. With a few exceptions, the essays predominantly focus on the centuries before the Reformation.[3] Given that I am a practicing Protestant who has for most of my adult life struggled to articulate the relationship between belief and practice, both in day-to-day life and as a theologian, the first two sections were of particular interest. However, as I read the essays from the last two sections, I was grateful to see where pursuing my questions might lead.
The first five essays explore how to speak theologically about the mystical tradition, or perhaps even why one would want to, and they are critical for framing this work. Rowan Williams opens the first essay, “Mystical Theology and Christian Self-Understanding,” by acknowledging that if “Christianity is a new consciousness before it is a new theology” we need to think about the language and practices of that consciousness to understand its meaning (9). To use such language and engage in these practices is the foundation of mystical theology. In this way, we fumble to inhabit and articulate Christian lives within the mystery of God. Understood this way, theology includes our prayers, our worship, and our faltering participation in God’s hopes for the whole creation. As such, mystical theology is “a fundamental dimension of Christian understanding” (21).
Mark A. McIntosh’s essay, “Mystical Theology at the Heart of Theology,” considers why an exploration of the Christian experience should be a central consideration for theology rather than a tertiary or devotional topic. He argues that where we typically define mysticism as “having to do with unusual states of an individual’s inner experience,” the mystical theological tradition is focused on “the mystery at the heart of the universe, the mystery of union with God” (27). This seems to me to offer an important point of correction to our modern sensibilities. Our conversation should not be about human experience as much as it is about “the hidden presence of God in scripture, liturgy, and creation” (27). This is theology that “train[s] the mind to attend upon God” in contrast to “teachings about God” (29, emphasis his). McIntosh argues that this kind of theology is characteristic of some of the great theologians of the tradition beginning with Origen and Augustine, developed in Thomas Aquinas, and present in the writings of Bonaventure, Maximus the Confessor and Meister Eckhart. And finally, McIntosh argues, because God’s presence is creative, mystical theology is concerned with re-creation; it “advances the community’s participation in the liberating work of Christ” (42).
In his essay “Mystical Theology and Human Experience,” Edward Howells responds to the modern discussion of religious experience begun by William James’s influential volume, The Varieties of Religious Experience (originally published in 1902). Where James put religious experience at the center of his investigation, Howells wants to reunite such experience with reflection in order to probe its character. He traces the modern response to James through Steven Katz, Nicholas Lash, and Denys Turner, and then he turns to three ancient theologians whose reflections on their experience were formative for making sense of their experience: Augustine, Meister Echkart, and Teresa of Avila. He concludes, “What holds these experiences [of the theologians discussed] together is not their experiential character as such but the process of growth that underpins them and gives them their rationale” (63).
Bernard McGinn offers the fourth essay in this section on foundational questions, “The Genealogy of Mystical Traditions.” He provides a “broad road map of the development of Christian mystical theology down to the Quietist Controversy and the triumph of the Enlightenment that took a decidedly negative view of mysticism as irrational fanaticism” (83). He begins with Origen and the Cappadocian Fathers and Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite in the Eastern patristic tradition; and Augustine, Ambrose, and John Cassian in the West. He includes several examples from the medieval period and ends with those who reacted to Martin Luther from the Radical Reformation and in Anglicanism, as well as from within the Roman Catholic Church.
Finally, Maria Clara Lucchetti Bingemer probes the relationship of mystical theology and political action in her essay “Mystical Theology in Contemporary Perspective.” She responds to the criticism that mysticism privatizes and subjectivizes religious experience with the result that Christian faith is detached from ethics and engagement with society. In particular, she is concerned with the connections among faith, suffering, justice, and mercy. For these bonds to remain strong, she argues, religious experience needs the reflective practice found in mystical theology. She notes that this is an especially pressing concern in poor countries, a context where charismatic Christianity flourishes, and in secular contexts where ethical and moral questions are resolved apart from a transcendent dimension.
These first five essays respond to the basic questions, what is mystical theology and how does it matter for the church now? The essayists provide strong answers to encourage engagement with mystical theology for the sake of the church worldwide and in the West. They open a fruitful dialogue about questions that matter for both theology and the practice of Christian faith.
The second group of essays focuses on practices that sustain religious mystical experience and shape reflection on it. Each of the essays contributes to the conversation, but three in particular will be more pertinent to Protestants like me. In “Living the Word,” spiritual reading is discussed by Kevin Hughes, who distinguishes reading for faith and reading for understanding. Hughes wonders how the two became distinguished and assesses several recent attempts to recover a unity (from Matthew Levering and Ephraim Radner). Joanne Maguire looks at how pedagogical and rhetorical strategies are modified in the mystical tradition so that they are appropriate for discipleship in this context. This has implications for understanding a human teacher’s authority when the tradition prioritizes God as teacher and for understanding pedagogical methods when the tradition recognizes that God works in a wide variety of ways. And Peter Tyler discusses prayer in the Christian tradition, beginning with Origen, Evagrius, and Augustine, and then turning to Teresa of Avila and twentieth-century writers Edith Stein and Thomas Merton. Equally fascinating are the discussions of topics less central to Protestant faith practice (e.g., Andrew Louth’s essay on the Eucharist and Lyke Dysinger’s essay on asceticism) or three chapters on reading mystical texts that include diaries, letters, vision reports, and the lives of mystics (Patricia Zimmerman Beckman and Rob Faesen) or considerations of their poetic form (Alexander J. B. Hampton).
The third section attends to typical topoi in mystical thought: the anthropology of this tradition; the widespread use of the journey motif; nuptial imagery (e.g., in the interpretation of Song of Songs); concepts of space and the abyss; mystical ways of knowing; and indwelling and union. Each of the essays in this section introduces questions and ways of thinking of the mystical tradition in its particularity. Because the mystics use different frameworks and concepts from what we find elsewhere in theology, I found these essays the most difficult to read.
The final essays turn to the ways mystical theology contributes to more typical theological categories and questions. This includes essays, as one would expect, on the Trinity, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology, creation and revelation, anthropology, and ecclesiology. But there are also essays on less expected topics: “Metaphysics, Theology, and the Mystical” (by David Tracy), on “The Mystical—or What Theology can Show” (by Jean-Luc Marion), “Theosis” (by Aristotle Papanikolaou), “Mysticism of the Social Life” (by Ann W. Astell), and “Interreligious Dialogue” (by Michael Barnes).
This is a remarkable volume of essays. It makes a substantial contribution to much-needed conversations. However, for the most part, as the list of contributors indicates, the authors teach at Notre Dame, Loyola, Leuven, Boston College, Villanova, Oblate School of Theology, and the Pontifical Catholic University. They are monks and priests and professors of Orthodoxy and Catholic Studies. This is not to say that all the contributors are Roman Catholic or Orthodox, but many are. Undoubtedly, this is because these are the Christian traditions that value studies in patristic and medieval theology—these are the people who have done this work.
But as the essays demonstrate, the volume should spark conversations beyond the academic discipline of mystical theology. This volume needs to provoke a conversation among a much wider group of people that includes those who are not specialists in mystical theology but who work in church contexts where religious experience plays an important role. It should perhaps even encompass people who are working missionally in a secular context with those who are spiritual but not religious. One might think of this volume like the book of Romans. Paul wrote the letter because he was confident that he had a spiritual gift to share with the Romans (1:11), but he was also confident that when he came to Rome, he would be mutually encouraged by the Roman church (1:12).
Charles Taylor defines secularism as a society or people with ideals of human flourishing that make no reference to the transcendent. In our time, we know many such people in the world and in the church. Kathleen Norris puts it well when she cites Nancy Mairs’s description of Protestantism of the twentieth century as religion with “all the mystery scrubbed out of it by a vigorous and slightly vinegary reason.”[4] One of the responses to such secularity is a more vital religious experience. And we may also know people who claim such experience, even if their tradition is not highly reflective and their practice appears to an outsider as disengaged from the world around them. This apparent lack of reflection and social disengagement suggests that the recovery of mystery within Christian faith may be as difficult an issue as its absence has been.
I suggest that there are two signs that intimate that the time might have come for such a conversation. The first is the strong reflective work coming out of the Pentecostal tradition. Scholars are publishing on topics like Pentecostal readings of Christian Scripture and the outworking of Pentecostal religious experience in life practices.[5] This is a growing body of academic work.
The second direction of study that has the potential to nurture a recovery of experience for Christian life and theology are the resources that are to be found within the Christian tradition itself. The Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology is for this reason a very timely book. Its essays and the resources it names are a rich introduction to the mystical tradition.
[1] See 1 John 1:1. This distinction between the public truth of crucifixion and the church’s witness to resurrection is maintained in all the Gospels. Paul is perhaps the exception—the risen Lord appears to him in order to call him to belief and service—but it is ambiguous whether the Lord appeared in a vision or otherwise.
[2] See Matthew 5:8; 1 John 3:2 (cf. Revelation 22:4); and Exodus 33:20 and John 1:18. Dale C. Allison notes that the Matthean beatitude “has perhaps generated more discussion than any of the others” in part because “the biblical tradition appears to contradict itself on the matter of the vision of God” (Allison, The Sermon on the Mount: Inspiring the Moral Imagination, ed. C. H. Talbert, Companions to the New Testament [New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1999], 50–51).
[3] For example, Anne Dillard is included in chapter 11, “Lives and Visions”; Edith Stein is included in chapter 10, “Prayer”; and Thomas Merton is included in chapters 10, “Prayer,” and 16, “Depth, Ground, Abyss,” of the Oxford Handbook of Mystical Theology.
[4] Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 16–17; and Norris, “Virgin Mary, Mother of God,” in American Magnificat: Protestants on Mary of Guadalupe, ed. Maxwell E. Johnson (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical, 2010), 159, citing Mairs, A Dynamic God: Living an Unconventional Catholic Faith (Boston, MA: Beacon, 2008), 25.
[5] For an example of Pentecostal readings of Scripture, see L. William Oliverio, Theological Hermeneutics in the Classical Pentecostal Tradition: A Typological Account, ed. Andrew Davies and William Kay, vol. 12, Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Studies (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012). For an example of the intersections between Pentecostal religious experience and life practices, see Néstor Medina, “Latinas/os, the Cultural, and the Bible: A Community Finds Itself in the Bible Story,” in Reading In-Between: How Minoritized Cultural Communities Interpret the Bible in Canada, eds. Néstor Medina, Alison Hari-Singh, and Hyeran Kim-Cragg (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2019).