"The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me." — Meister Eckhart
Overview
Christian mysticism is the long, sometimes uneasy tradition of Christians who sought union with God rather than merely right belief about God. It runs from the desert hermits of the third century through the medieval cloisters to the Spanish Carmelites, and it keeps insisting on the same scandalous claim: that the soul can, in this life, be joined to God — not metaphorically, not at the end of history, but here, in the dark, in prayer. Within Christianity it is the experiential stream flowing under the doctrinal riverbed, sometimes nourishing it, sometimes flooding the banks.
The Shape of the Path
The classical map has three stages — purgation, illumination, union — the soul stripped of attachment, granted light, and finally married to God. The tradition's most distinctive contribution, though, is the via negativa, the apophatic way: the insistence that God exceeds every concept, so the surest approach is unknowing. Pseudo-Dionysius (c. 500) gave it a vocabulary; the anonymous fourteenth-century English author of The Cloud of Unknowing gave it a method — beat upon the cloud with darts of longing love, and let thinking go.
The gallery of witnesses is astonishing. The Desert Fathers and Mothers withdrew to the Egyptian wilderness and invented Christian contemplative discipline. Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) preached the birth of God in the soul and a Godhead beyond God, in language so daring the Inquisition condemned propositions from his work posthumously. Julian of Norwich, anchored to a church wall, received her Showings during a near-fatal illness and distilled them into the most quoted sentence in English mysticism: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. Teresa of Avila mapped the soul as an Interior Castle of seven mansions, and her collaborator John of the Cross named the passage every contemplative dreads and needs — the dark night of the soul, in which God removes every consolation so that only God, and not the pleasures of God, remains. Their heirs range from Brother Lawrence practicing the presence of God in a monastery kitchen to Thomas Merton and the modern Centering Prayer movement.
Mysticism and the Church
The relationship with the institution has always been dialectical. The mystics were mostly loyal — monastics, priests, anchorites — and mostly careful to submit their experiences to the church's judgment. The church, for its part, canonized some (Teresa and John are Doctors of the Church) and condemned others (Eckhart, Marguerite Porete — burned in 1310 for The Mirror of Simple Souls). The line between sanctity and heresy often came down to politics, gender, and vocabulary. Where Gnosticism took direct knowing outside the church and was expelled, the mystics ran the same experiment inside it, tethered to sacrament and creed — which is arguably why their stream survived.
The Reformation sharpened the argument. Calvinism stands as the great counterpoint within Christianity itself: deeply suspicious of mystical ascent, of any ladder the soul might climb to God, insisting that fallen reason and fallen experience cannot be trusted and that God is known through Scripture and grace alone — revelation descending, never experience ascending. It is the received-doctrine pole stated with maximum clarity, and the mystics' claim of union is precisely what it distrusts. The debate between them is the tension this whole folder documents, played out within a single religion.
There is a quieter kinship, too, with the Jewish mystical intuition of The Shekhinah — the indwelling presence of God, divinity that does not merely rule from beyond but dwells with. The mystics' whole wager is that the dwelling can be felt.
Related
- Christianity — the parent tradition
- Gnosticism — the expelled sibling; direct knowing outside the church
- Calvinism — the in-house counterpoint that distrusts mystical ascent
- Hesychasm — the Eastern Orthodox branch of the same stream
- The Shekhinah — the indwelling presence, the Jewish cousin of the mystics' intuition
- Mysticism — the collection this note belongs to