Evagrius of Pontus, a fourth-century monk of the Egyptian desert, writes, “If you truly pray, you are a theologian. If you are a theologian, you truly pray.”1 Theology, for Evagrius, is not speech about God but rather an address to and waiting on God. Origen, the Alexandrian theologian who profoundly influenced Evagrius and is essential to the articulation of medieval mystical theology, understands the reading of scripture to be an ascetic undertaking whereby the reader is transformed through a process of becoming conformed to the text. The mysterious sixth-century Syrian monk Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, who invents the phrase “mystical theology” in his treatise of that name, outlines the way of ascent to God through the unsaying of the divine names. He states that to speak apophatically is to “praise the transcendent one in a transcending way.”2 It is a mode of address that issues not in silence but worship.
These formulations from early Christian thinkers suggest that theology is a spiritual practice, a mode of writing, reading, and articulation that arises from, facilitates, and communicates a relationship with the divine. This notion of the holism of the theological endeavor, conceived as having implications not only for how a thinker understands and speaks of God but also for how they live, feel, and change, makes its way into the definition of Christian mysticism that frames Bernard McGinn’s magisterial volumes on Christian mystical theology, The Presence of God: “the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God.”3 Mystical theology, according to McGinn, is not merely speculation on the mechanics of a hidden God’s revelation to the world. Nor is it located in extraordinary individual experiences of divine immediacy. Rather, it entails a transformative engagement with the divine that includes the whole life of the mystic. No one, according to McGinn, “believed in or practiced ‘mysticism.’”4 McGinn’s claim undermines the distinction between experience and interpretation, or what often travels in contemporary discourse as a distinction between mysticism and mystical theology.
In conjuring a portrait of the mystic in the service of his genealogy of the early modern rise of mysticism—a substantive noun—from what he identifies as the ancient adjectival formulation as mystical theology (which he sees as a discourse anchored in church structures, its doctrinal frameworks and theological project), the historian and philosopher Michel de Certeau sketches an image that is perhaps rather different than what springs to mind when one imagines Evagrius or Pseudo-Dionysius. De Certeau describes the mystic as a modern creature, one who speaks from the midst of the ruins of institutions, social orders, and epistemes. Mystics seek God in the wake of his absence from those securing regimes that previously had supported such a search. What de Certeau terms la mystique is a discourse of loss and longing, a fragile venture in which both the self who speaks and the divine addressee eludes possession and definition. This uprootedness is particular to the early modern context, according to de Certeau. However, he also notes that this modern discourse draws on and continues the “‘mystical’ turns of the ancient modus loquendi,” in which the “sayable continues to be wounded by the unsayable.”5 If the unsayability of the divine referent of mystic speech is a fundamental concern of premodern mystical theology, and this elusiveness functioned as a seductive lure both generating and undoing language, for de Certeau, the loss of the securing regimes of the church in early modernity doubled, rather than introduced from whole cloth, that sense of elusiveness, of the wandering voice.
With de Certeau, McGinn, and countless other scholars of mysticism, it is a fundamental premise of this book that mystical theology is historical: “One can only speak of the mystic as an historical formulation, an historically circumscribed object.”6 De Certeau’s genealogy of mysticism, one that marks a difference between late ancient and medieval mystical theology and mysticism is important, if only one among many possible. There are institutional, political, and social shifts in the early modern period to which it is crucial to attend as they indelibly affect theological imagination and discourse.
However, circumscribing a period and a field does not deny connections and continuities across boundaries; de Certeau himself speaks of the mystic “configuration” running from the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries.7 Thus, this book holds that much mystical theology of the late ancient and medieval periods aspires to honor and cultivate the delicacy de Certeau sees in early modern mystics but without pitting itself against a broader conception of theological discourse. If we understand mystical theology to be discourse about God (who would then become an object of study that we claim better or worse knowledge of), the effect of such a move would be to reinforce a notion of the mystical as naked experience that stands over and against textual inscription, tradition, and language. Mysticism in this framework is relegated to the margins while mystical theology becomes solely a method of consolidation. If we, rather, following Origen, Evagrius, and Pseudo-Dionysius, understand mystical theology as a mode of discourse in the register of prayer—prayer that might include content about the divine but is in the framework of an address, a call and response—we offer a vision of theology that does not pre-empt its openness to revision, that does not disdain but rather cultivates the generative fragility de Certeau found in early modern mystics.
This book, then, sees mystical theology not as second-order reflection on an extraordinary experience that emerges sui generis and stands apart from the life of the devotee. Nor does it see mystical theology as discourse about God and self that attempts only to domesticate and frame what would otherwise be mystifying. It is not the same venture as recording an answer to a question. Mystical theology is, rather, that which facilitates the putting of the self, the world, and one’s understanding into question, and of holding open those questions in an ascetic, transformative process that is meant to bring the reader and writer into connection with God.
The portrait I have painted here of continuity between theological practice broadly construed and mystical theology in premodern Christianity—both in terms of the ways in which they are each conceived as spiritual disciplines that seek transformative union with God, and in the claim that mystical theology is embedded within language, tradition, practice, and communal forms of life—perhaps begs the question of why the ‘mystical’ need be a category at all. According to these terms, is it not all summed up within theology proper? This is a question with which those who wish to emphasize the theological in mystical theology have struggled. Denys Turner, for example, identifies the mystical with the apophatic and argues that apophasis is part of an “overarching theological strategy” that “may be said to constitute the ‘mystical element’ in all theology,” or at least in “classical traditions of the Middle Ages.” Within the overarching claim that “theology in so far as it is theology is ‘mystical’ and in so far as it is ‘mystical’ it is theology,” however, Turner singles out a canon of mystical literature defined by means of an emphasis on male-authored, negative, Neoplatonic traditions for his study of “the darkness of God.”8
In light of this question of identifying the role of the adjectival formulation of theology as mystical, it is useful to return to McGinn’s definition and note the fundamental tensions within it: the “consciousness of the immediacy of divine presence” that McGinn identifies as central to mystical theology is inextricably yoked to history, language, practice, and tradition in the preparation for and reaction to that consciousness.9 The tensions operative in the definition are those between immediacy and mediation, transcendence and immanence, historical embeddedness and the eternal that is outside of time and language. These tensions are inescapable and often fraught within both mystical discourse and the scholarship it inspires, with the accent often placed on one side of the binary or another.10
I understand the space generated by these polarities to be the site at which mystical discourse and writing about it arises. It is the play between them that is the means by which the generative fragility of mystical discourse comes to be, emerging through the articulation of the tension between the historical and that which transcends time, the attempt to give word or lineament to a referent uncapturable by any finite medium, in the drive to seek the more in heaven and earth than has been dreamt in one’s philosophy, in asking what might emerge from within and yet not be captured by one’s social location or educational formation. This is not merely a claim that what scholars of mysticism have access to are texts rather than experience proper, but that writing—language—is the historically rooted space and activity in and through which mystical theology occurs, a space of discovery, interpretation, invention, and play.
In order to provide some boundary to the seemingly endless well of possible angles of commentary and study, this book primarily surveys Anglophone and Francophone scholarship of the last twenty years that is opening new paths in Christian mystical theology or engaging with it to address issues in disciplines outside of theology. It focuses on the reception of Christian medieval mystical texts by theologians, literary scholars, psychoanalytic theorists, and students of Black Studies.11
Evagrius Ponticus, “Chapters on Prayer,” in The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, trans. John Eudes Bamburger (Cistercian Publications, 1972), chap. 60.
Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Mystical Theology,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid and Paul Rorem (Paulist Press, 1987), chapter 2, 1025A.
Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Christian Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, vol. 1, The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (Crossroad, 1992), xvii. McGinn chooses the Lonergan-inspired term ‘consciousness’ here and ‘awareness’ elsewhere (xv–xvi) rather than ‘experience’ or ‘knowledge’ because the latter terms imply a separation of subject and object of knowledge and the use of intention on the part of the experiencer.
McGinn, Foundations, xvi.
Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Volume 1: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (University of Chicago Press, 1992), 78.
Marie-Christine Gomez-Géraud and Jean-René Valette, eds., Le discours mystique entre Moyen Âge et première modernité, t. 1, La question du langage (Honoré Champion, 2019), 13.
De Certeau, Mystic Fable, 4.
Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 265.
Grace Jantzen argues that McGinn’s inclusive definition of mysticism still in fact “sees mysticism essentially in terms of intense, private, subjective experiences.” McGinn writes, “Rather than trying to define mysticism (any simple definition of such a complex and controversial phenomenon seems utopian), I prefer to give a sense of how I understand the term by discussing it under three headings: mysticism as a part or element of religion; mysticism as a process or way of life; and mysticism as an attempt to express a direct consciousness of the presence of God” (McGinn, Foundations, xv). However, for Jantzen, the third heading is decisive, for it is the “incorporation of the psychological state” in the first two headings that renders them mystical (Grace M. Jantzen, Power, Gender, and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5–6). Turner also accuses McGinn of psychologizing mysticism, rendering it a function of extraordinary experience he terms ‘experientialism’ (Turner, Darkness, 262–265). Philip Sheldrake, on the other hand, understands McGinn’s notion of mystical theology to refer to a scale of intensity. He argues that for McGinn, mystics don’t “set out to practice ‘mysticism,’” meaning to seek extraordinary states of consciousness, but rather to “live the Christian life in an intense way” (Philip Sheldrake, “A Critical Theological Perspective,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia A. Lamm (J. Wiley, 2013), 588). McGinn argues that the late antique and medieval traditions, whether in their negative Neoplatonic guise as studied by Turner, or more broadly, incorporating, for example, Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Cistercians, Victorines, and beguines, demonstrates a complex view of experience (McGinn, Foundations, xiii). Much of this has to do with the canon specified. What does one include within the rubric of mystical theology? While McGinn expands the canon, Turner contracts.
This tension also accounts for a fact that cannot be forgotten in attempts to include and, in some cases, seamlessly incorporate mystical theology within the rubric of theology writ large, namely that those who were seen to practice mystical theology were often accounted dangerous, subversive, requiring control and management, sometimes unto death. The beguine Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Place des Grèves for the teachings in her Mirror of Simple Souls and her refusal to desist from distributing the book. Seventeen of Meister Eckhart’s propositions were condemned as heretical with another eleven deemed suspect in 1329 by Pope John XXII. Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love struggles to account for her visionary insight and its concordance with what “Holy church teaches and preaches.” The author of The Cloud of Unknowing opens the text with a warning that the practices it describes are not for beginners and could in fact be dangerous, a trope that can be seen in Origen and Gregory of Nyssa’s Commentary and Sermons on the Song of Songs and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite’s On Mystical Theology. The discernment of spirits discourse, in which people were subjected to juridical procedures that decided whether or not their visions were from Satan or God (an issue of crucial importance for women for whom, especially after the rise of the all-male university, the vision was central text and source of theological authority), became increasingly institutionalized and pervasive during and after the fourteenth century, as we see in the discourse around people such as Brigit of Sweden, Catherine of Siena, and Joan of Arc. Teresa of Avila had to give an account of herself to the Spanish Inquisition. Madame Guyon was accused of teaching quietism in her book, A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, and subsequently imprisoned from 1695–1703. Yet, church authorities also saw mysticism in the modern period as differentiated enough from dogmatic theology to serve as a means by which extraordinary experiences could certify doctrine, a point discussed in chapter 2. Such a certifying role for visions occurred, according to Don Cupitt, in the nineteenth-century Catholic church, but it can also be seen among thirteenth-century clerics who appealed to women’s eucharistic piety accompanied by extraordinary capacities and paramystical phenomena in order to prove the truth of the doctrine of the incarnation and the sacramental system mediated by priests. See Dyan Elliott, Proving Woman: Female Spirituality and Inquisitional Culture in the Later Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2004); Amy Hollywood, The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart (University of Notre Dame Press, 1995).
The book does not address scholarship on other religious traditions. Here are some suggestions for recent works on non-Christian traditions: For an analysis of Sufism from the earliest centuries of Islam to the present, see Alexander Knysh, Sufism: A New History of Islamic Mysticism (Princeton, 2017). Through a study of Sufi romantic tales, written in Muslim courts but in a vernacular Indian language, Aditya Behl shows how these tales “constitute the earliest attempt at the indigenization of Islamic literature in an Indian setting.” Aditya Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary Tradition, 1379–1545, ed. Wendy Doniger (Oxford University Press, 2012). For a study of the medieval Jewish mystical text, the Zohar, see Melila Hellner-Eshed, A River Flows from Eden: The Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar (Stanford University Press, 2009). On the appeal to and revival of ancient rabbinic wisdom traditions by medieval Castilian authors, see Jeremy Phillip Brown, A World of Piety: The Aims of Castilian Kabbalah (Stanford University Press, 2025). On the philosophical and practical problems raised by meditation practices in Chan Buddhism, which critiques the dualism between practice and realization, means and ends, seeking and the ideal of non-dual reality, see Jacob Bender, “Chan Buddhism on the Non-duality of Practice and Realization,” Philosophy Compass 19, no. 9–10 (2024): 1–14,