Christian Mystical Writings from Pseudo-Dionysius to John of the Cross

A few pages written around the year 500 under the name of the Athenian converted by Paul, a pseudonym accepted for a thousand years and disproved in the Renaissance. It founds the apophatic tradition by denying of God in turn everything that has been affirmed, and everything later on this path draws on it.

An anonymous Middle English guide to contemplative prayer, written for a young disciple. It depends heavily on Pseudo-Dionysius and gives unusually concrete advice: hold to a single short word and let it stand for the whole intention, with a cloud of forgetting placed over everything created.

Julian of Norwich records sixteen visions received during a severe illness in 1373 and the twenty years she spent thinking about them. It is the earliest surviving book in English known to be by a woman, and it survives in a short text and a longer one that adds her reflection.

Four short books of counsel on the inner life, written in Latin between about 1418 and 1427 and rooted in the Devotio Moderna of the Low Countries. Its manner is deliberately unlearned, and the attribution to Thomas a Kempis is the strongest of several proposed but is not universally accepted.

Ignatius of Loyola drafted this manual from his own experience at Manresa and revised it over twenty five years. It is a guide for the person directing a retreat of about thirty days, with rules for discerning consolation and desolation, and the retreat is still given today.

Teresa of Avila wrote this in 1577 for her nuns, picturing the soul as a castle of many rooms around a centre where God dwells. Its seven dwellings mark stages of prayer, and she insists that progress is measured by love of neighbour and not by experiences.

The first of John of the Cross's two treatises on his own poem, concerned with what a person can do: the emptying of memory, understanding and will. It argues in scholastic form, includes the sketch of the mountain with nothing written along the direct path, and is unfinished.

The second treatise, on what is done to the soul through the passive purifications of the senses and then the spirit. John means the darkness as God working and not God absent, the reverse of the modern phrase. It forms one work with the Ascent and breaks off mid argument.