The Soul United to God

Unio mystica, Latin for mystical union, names the culminating experience described across Christian mystical theology, a state in which the soul is understood to be joined to God in a manner exceeding ordinary devotion or prayer, described variously as a marriage, an absorption, or a transformation of the soul so complete that mystics reach for paradox to describe it.

Bernard of Clairvaux used bridal imagery drawn from the Song of Songs to describe the soul's union with the divine bridegroom; Teresa of Avila mapped a graded ascent through the interior castle toward a spiritual marriage in its innermost chamber; Meister Eckhart pushed the language furthest, speaking of a ground of the soul where creature and Creator meet in a unity that provoked charges of heresy in his own lifetime. Christian theologians have almost universally insisted, against the more extreme readings, that unio mystica describes a union of will and love rather than an identity of substance, the soul remaining creature even at its closest approach to the Creator, a distinction meant to keep mystical theology within the bounds of a tradition that holds God and creation to be ontologically distinct. Later mystical writers, including John of the Cross and the anonymous author of the Cloud of Unknowing, extended this vocabulary while keeping the same careful boundary between a union of will and an identity of being.