The Mystical Tradition, and the Church's Long Unease With It

Christian mysticism is not a denomination and not a movement. It is a current running through every major branch of the religion, and it names the claim that the God spoken about in doctrine can be known directly, in this life, in a way that is not the same as reasoning correctly about him.

The vocabulary is largely settled by two figures. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, writing in Syria around 500 and taken for centuries to be an apostolic authority, gave the tradition its distinction between affirmative theology, which says what God is, and apophatic or negative theology, which proceeds by denying every predicate as inadequate and arrives at a darkness that is not ignorance. Augustine gave the Latin west its language of interiority and restlessness.

The main lines:

• The Greek east made it doctrine rather than a specialism. Theosis, deification, is the ordinary goal of the Christian life, and hesychasm, the practice of inner stillness with the Jesus Prayer, was defended by Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century with a distinction between God's unknowable essence and his uncreated energies, which the Orthodox churches subsequently affirmed as dogma.
• Western monasticism produced Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs, and the Victorines, and then the fourteenth-century flowering: Meister Eckhart, whose preaching on the ground of the soul was posthumously condemned in part in 1329; Julian of Norwich, an anchoress whose Revelations of Divine Love is the first book written in English by a woman; the anonymous Cloud of Unknowing; Jan van Ruusbroec in the Low Countries.
• The Spanish sixteenth century produced Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, both of whom were investigated by the Inquisition and both of whom are now Doctors of the Church, which is a fair summary of the tradition's relationship with authority.
• Protestantism kept it more often than is remembered: Jakob Boehme, the Quaker doctrine of the Inner Light, Pietism, and in the twentieth century Thomas Merton and Evelyn Underhill.

The recurring institutional anxiety is not hard to identify. If God can be known directly, the mediating structures (clergy, sacrament, doctrinal formulation), become in principle dispensable, and mystics have repeatedly said things that sound, out of context and sometimes in it, like a claim to be identical with God. Eckhart was condemned; Marguerite Porete was burned in Paris in 1310 for refusing to withdraw her book; Teresa was interrogated. The same church later canonised several of them and made Doctors of two.

A caution about the word. Twentieth-century writing on comparative religion, following William James, often treated mysticism as a single universal experience appearing in local costume. Recent scholarship has largely abandoned that: what a Carmelite nun and a Zen monk and a Sufi are doing are shaped by their traditions all the way down, and the resemblances are easier to assert than to demonstrate.