Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice: Renewing the Contemplative Tradition 9781317066187, 9781472480095, 9781315605388

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‘Mystical theology has experienced a marked revival in recent decades, not least because, as the authors of Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice put it, mystical theology “seeks to engage and illuminate theology in such a way as to rescue it from only being a rational and intellectual exercise”. Many of the important links between spiritual practice and mystical theology are incisively explored in the essays in this volume. The collection reminds us that fostering connections between theory and practice, especially the practice of prayer, is necessary for true cultivation of the spirit in our fractured world.’ Bernard McGinn, Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago

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Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice

In Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice several leading scholars explore key themes within the Christian mystical tradition, contemporary and historical. The overall aim of the book is to demonstrate the relevance of mystical theology to contemporary spiritual practice. Attention is given to the works of Baron von Hügel, Vladimir Lossky, Margery Kempe, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Merton, and Francisco de Osuna, as well as to a wide range of spiritual practices, including pilgrimage, spiritual direction, contemplative prayer and the quotidian spirituality of the New Monasticism. Christian mystical theology is shown to be a living tradition, which has vibrant and creative new expressions in contemporary spiritual practice. It is argued that mystical theology affirms something both ordinary and extraordinary which is fundamental to the Christian experience of prayer. Christopher C.H. Cook is Professor of Spirituality, Theology and Health in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist with Tees, Esk & Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust, and an Honorary Minor Canon at Durham Cathedral. He trained at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, and worked in the psychiatry of substance misuse for over 25 years. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 2001. He has research doctorates in psychiatry and in theology. He is Director of the Project for Spirituality, Theology & Health at Durham University. He is the author of The Philokalia and the Inner Life (Clarke, 2011) and editor of Spirituality and Narrative in Psychiatric Practice (eds Cook, Powell and Sims, RCPsych Press 2016) and Spirituality, Theology and Mental Health (SCM, 2013). He is a member of the core research team for the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University. Julienne McLean practices as a psychologist, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst in north London, as well as being a spiritual director and retreat director. She has been on the clinical team of St Marylebone Healing and Counselling Centre, London, for many years. She teaches at St Mary’s University, Twickenham and Sarum College, Salisbury, where she is a Visiting Scholar in Christian Spirituality. She facilitates a contemplative spirituality retreat

programme and is the author of Towards Mystical Union (St Pauls, 2003, 2013), a modern spiritual and psychological commentary on St Teresa of Avila’s classic text, The Interior Castle. Peter Tyler is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Spirituality at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. His recent books include The Pursuit of the Soul: Psychoanalysis, Soul-making and the Christian Tradition (T & T Clark, 2016), Picturing the Soul: Revisioning Psychotherapy and Spiritual Direction (Dharmaram, 2014), Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Soul (Bloomsbury, 2013) and The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian Spirituality (ed. with Richard Woods, Bloomsbury, 2012). He is a registered psychotherapist as well as Director of the Centre for Initiatives in Spirituality and Reconciliation (InSpiRe) at St Mary’s.

Contemporary Theological Explorations in Christian Mysticism Series Editors: Patricia Z. Beckman, Oliver Davies and George Pattison

This series facilitates new points of synergy and fresh theological engagements with Christian mystical traditions. Reflecting the plurality of theological approaches to Christian mystical theology, books in the series cover historical, literary, practical, and systematic perspectives as well as philosophical, psychological, and phenomenological methods. Although the primary focus of the series is the Christian tradition, exploration of texts from other traditions also highlight the theological, psychological and philosophical questions that Christian mysticism brings to the fore. https://www.routledge.com/religion/series/ACONTHEOMYS Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology Between Transcendence and Immanence Edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism Opening to the Mystical Edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore Mysticism in the French Tradition Eruptions from France Edited by Louise Nelstrop and Bradley B. Onishi Mystical Anthropology Authors from the Low Countries Edited by John Arblaster and Rob Faesen Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy Interchange in the Wake of God Edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore and Duane Williams

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Mystical Theology and Contemporary Spiritual Practice Renewing the Contemplative Tradition Edited by Christopher C.H. Cook, Julienne McLean and Peter Tyler

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Christopher C.H. Cook, Julienne McLean and Peter Tyler; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Christopher C.H. Cook, Julienne McLean and Peter Tyler to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cook, Chris (Christopher C.H.), editor. Title: Mystical theology and contemporary spiritual practice: renewing the contemplative tradition / edited by Christopher C.H. Cook, Julienne McLean, and Peter Tyler. Description: New York: Routledge, 2017. | Series: Contemporary theological explorations in Christian mysticism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017017975 | ISBN 9781472480095 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315605388 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Mysticism. | Contemplation. | Spiritual life—Christianity. | Monastic and religious life. Classification: LCC BV5091.C7 M97 2017 | DDC 248.2/2—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017017975 ISBN: 978-1-472-48009-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-60538-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

This book is dedicated to St Cuthbert, St Aidan, and all the saints of Lindisfarne

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Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: mystical theology: renewing the contemplative tradition

xiii xvi

1

P eter T yler , J ulienne M c L ean and C hristopher C . H . C ook

1 Baron Friedrich von Hügel on the mystical element of religion: has the Baron a message for us today?

9

M etropolitan K allistos Ware of D iokleia

2 What did Vladimir Lossky mean by ‘mystical theology’?

22

A ndrew L outh

3 The mystical theology of Margery Kempe: writing the inner life

34

C orinne S aunders

4 Unlikely mystics: Durham Cathedral as mystical space for ordinary people

58

Rosalind B rown

5 The renewal of contemplative traditions: new monasticism and quotidian practices

80

B ernadette F lanagan

6 Wittgenstein reads Merton: the mystical theology of two twentieth-century masters P eter T yler

95

xii Contents

7 Mystical theology and the renewal of contemplative spiritual practice

109

J ulienne M c L E A N and C hristopher C . H . C ook

Concluding reflections: mystical theology: renewing the contemplative tradition

121

C hristopher C . H . C ook , J ulienne M c L ean and P eter T yler

Index

127

List of contributors

Rosalind Brown is Canon Librarian at Durham Cathedral and has overseen the nave, or public, ministries of the Cathedral since 2005. Her first career was in town planning in the south of England and then in the 1990s she lived for nine years in a deprived town in the US as a member of a Benedictine community, during which time she studied at Yale Divinity School and was ordained. After returning to the UK and prior to coming to Durham, she trained people for ordination in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral. A published hymn writer and a former columnist for ‘Church Times’, her interests include hymnody as an expression of theology and piety, and her publications include books on ordained ministry, preaching and hymnody. Christopher C.H. Cook is Professor of Spirituality, Theology and Health in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University, an Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist with Tees, Esk & Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust, and an Honorary Minor Canon at Durham Cathedral. He trained at St George’s Hospital Medical School, London, and worked in the psychiatry of substance misuse for over 25 years. He was ordained as an Anglican priest in 2001. He has research doctorates in psychiatry and in theology. He is Director of the Project for Spirituality, Theology & Health at Durham University. He is the author of The Philokalia and the Inner Life (Clarke, 2011) and editor of Spirituality and Narrative in Psychiatric Practice (eds Cook, Powell and Sims, RCPsych Press 2016) and Spirituality, Theology and Mental Health (SCM, 2013). He is a member of the core research team for the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University. Bernadette Flanagan is Associate Professor of Spirituality in the Department of Applied Arts at Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland. Her publications include The Spirit of the City (Veritas, 1999); in collaboration with Una Agnew/Greg Heylin; With Wisdom Seeking God: The Academic Study of Spirituality (Peeters, 2008) and in collaboration with Michael O’Sullivan SJ, Spiritual Capital (Ashgate, 2012). She has served on the Governing Board of the international Society for the Study of Christian Spirituality and is a non-resident faculty scholar of the Duke University Center

xiv  List of contributors

for Spirituality, Religion and Health. More recently she has been researching the subject of women and new monasticisms, and her book on this subject, Embracing Solitude, was published in December 2013 by Wipf & Stock. Currently she is co-editor for the forthcoming (2018) Routledge Handbook of Spirituality and Society. Andrew Louth is Professor Emeritus of Patristic and Byzantine Studies, ­University of Durham, and was Visiting Professor of Eastern Orthodox ­Theology at the Amsterdam Centre of Eastern Orthodox Theology (ACEOT), Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam from 2010 to 2014. He is also ­ ussian Orthodox Diocese of Sourozh (Moscow Patriara priest of the R chate), serving the parish in Durham. His most recent books have been Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology (SPCK, 2013) and Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (SPCK, 2015). Julienne McLean practices as a psychologist, psychotherapist and Jungian analyst in north London, as well as being a spiritual director and retreat director. She has been on the clinical team of St Marylebone Healing and Counselling Centre, London, for many years. She teaches at St Mary’s University Twickenham and Sarum College, Salisbury, where she is a Visiting Scholar in Christian Spirituality. She facilitates a contemplative spirituality retreat programme and is the author of Towards Mystical Union (St Pauls, 2003, 2013), a modern spiritual and psychological commentary on St Teresa of Avila’s classic text, The Interior Castle. Corinne Saunders is Professor of Medieval Literature and Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas, with a particular emphasis on medicine, emotions, gender and the body. She is working on a study of mind, body and affect, and is a Co-Investigator on the interdisciplinary project ‘Hearing the Voice’ and a Collaborator on ‘Life of Breath’ (both funded by the Wellcome Trust). Her third monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, was published in 2010. Peter Tyler is Professor of Pastoral Theology and Spirituality at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. His recent books include The Pursuit of the Soul: Psychoanalysis, Soul-making and the Christian Tradition (T & T Clark, 2016), Picturing the Soul: Revisioning Psychotherapy and Spiritual Direction (Dharmaram, 2014), Teresa of Avila: Doctor of the Soul (Bloomsbury 2013) and The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian Spirituality (ed. with Richard Woods, Bloomsbury 2012). He is a registered psychotherapist as well as Director of the Centre for Initiatives in Spirituality and Reconciliation (InSpiRe) at St Mary’s. Metropolitan Kallistos (Timothy Ware) is widely known for his writings on the history and worship of the Orthodox Church, and for his work in inter-Christian dialogue. Born in 1934, he joined the Orthodox Church

List of contributors  xv

in 1958, and was ordained priest in 1966 and bishop in 1982. He is a member of the monastic brotherhood of St John the Theologian on the island of Patmos, Greece. For thirty-five years (1966–2001) he taught Orthodox theology in the University of Oxford, and in 1966 he founded the Greek Parish of the Holy Trinity in Oxford. Until recently he was Orthodox Co-Chairman of the International Anglican-­Orthodox Theological Dialogue, and he was also a member of the International ­Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. He holds six honorary doctorates, and is a corresponding member of the Academy of Athens. His best-known publications are The Orthodox Church (Penguin Books) and The Orthodox Way (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press). He is a co-translator of three volumes of material from the Orthodox service books, and of four volumes of The Philokalia.

Acknowledgements

Without the unceasing help and encouragement of a number of key people a wide-ranging volume of this scope and size could not have come into being. Our thanks first and foremost must be expressed to all the speakers and delegates at our original Durham conference. This conference could not have come about without the administrative support of Rachel Davies to whom we would like to give especial thanks. We are very grateful to Sarah Lloyd, our initial editorial contact at Ashgate, and to all the Ashgate and Routledge staff who subsequently helped with developing the proposal and preparing the book for publication. We hope you will agree with us that they have done a magnificent job. Chris Cook would like to thank Professor Paul Murray and colleagues in the Centre for Catholic Studies at Durham University for their support for the conference and thus, indirectly, the book. Chris also acknowledges with thanks support from Corinne Saunders, and all his colleagues in the Hearing the Voice project team (www.dur.ac.uk/hearingthevoice/) and to the Wellcome Trust and the Guild of Health for their respective sources of financial support, from which he benefitted during the preparation of this volume. Julienne McLean would like to thank her professional colleagues, mentors and friends for their support, assistance, wisdom and encouragement over many years. In particular, she would like to thank members of her team who help facilitate a contemplative spirituality programme in London. (www. contemplativespirituality.org) Peter Tyler would like to thank all his fellow members of the Centre for Initiatives for Spirituality and Reconciliation (InSpiRe, www.stmarys.ac.uk/ inspire) at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London for their continuing help and support. In particular Dr Lynne Scholefield and Steph Modak helped enormously with preparation and promoting of the conference. Peter is also grateful to the Head of the School of Education, Theology and Leadership, Dr Maureen Glackin and the Vice-Chancellor of St Mary’s University, Dr Francis Campbell, for their continued support for the work of InSpiRe and granting the time necessary to prepare and edit this volume.

Introduction Mystical theology: renewing the contemplative tradition Peter Tyler, Julienne McLean and Christopher C.H. Cook

Studies of mystical theology have undergone something of a renaissance in the past few years. After enjoying a flourishing at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries prompted by the ‘mystical turn’ of writers such as Vaughan (1856), Inge (1899), von Hügel (1908) and Underhill (1910) ‘mysticism’, as they preferred to call it, fell somewhat out of fashion. The deconstruction of the term by writers such as Katz (1978) and Lash (1988) in the 1970s and 1980s seemed to sound the death knell for the subject as a serious locus of academic endeavour. However, the monumental work of Professor Bernard McGinn over a quarter of a century in his projected seven-volume series on the history of Western Christian Mysticism, The Presence of God (McGinn 1991, 1994, 1998, 2005, 2012, 2016) suddenly made the subject respectable again and propelled by his work and that of his students and colleagues we find ourselves once again experiencing a new spring of mystical studies. McGinn (1991) following von Hügel (1908) sees the mystical element of Christianity as ‘that part of its belief and practices that concerns the preparation for, the consciousness of and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God’ (McGinn 1991: xvii). The term, then, for him signifies that element of religion which is concerned with the immediate and lived-out aspect of faith rather than the theoretical or theological speculation upon it. Bouyer (1981: 46) traces the term as used by the Church fathers and mothers as a metaphor for the experience of the risen Christ in His church to its origins in the m ūs or m ūstikos of the Greek mystery religions. By the time we reach the early Middle Ages and the growth of the universities in Western Europe mystical theology begins to emerge as a distinctive branch of theology, especially in centres of learning such as Paris, Chartres and Oxford. Thus from the twelfth/thirteenth centuries onwards we see in these places the rise of a type of discourse that centres around the recovery and translation of the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite.1 Central to this movement was the group of theologians that arose around the Abbey of Saint Denis near the schools of Paris.2 This group of writers and commentators took particular interest in the Dionysian corpus which was in the process of being re-translated by theologians such as Sarracenus and Robert Grosseteste in a

2  Peter Tyler et al.

manner which replaced the deficiencies of the older translations by Hilduin and Eriugena.3 The abbey grew with the schools of Paris and was open to the new theological developments of the university and from its inception it was concerned with questions on the relationship between the intellectus and affectus, which we can loosely translate as ‘intellect’ and ‘affect’. Within the texts of Dionysius the ‘Victorines’, as they became known, discovered a form of writing that allowed scholars to combine the intellect with the affect. This went on to form the basis of much of the later medieval tradition of the theologia mystica or ‘mystical theology’. A good example of this discourse can be seen in the work of Jean Gerson (1363–1429), sometime Chancellor of the University of Paris. In his writing Gerson informs us that there are two types of theology open to study.4 The first of these is the ‘speculative theology’ – the theologia speculativa – which is the theology of the intellect concerned with sharpening our understanding of the logos of Christian life. This would largely correspond to the type of theology taught in most universities today. However, in addition to this mode of theology he describes another, drawing upon Dionysius and the Victorines. This is the ‘mystical theology’/theologia mystica which as the theology of the affectus is concerned with the pathos of Christian life – what we would often today refer to as ‘Christian spirituality’ (See Tyler and Woods 2012). For Gerson and his fellow practitioners of mystical theology ‘knowledge of God is better acquired through a penitent affect than an investigative mind’ (GMT: 1.28.1). Thus, speculative theology uses ‘reasoning in conformity with philosophical disciplines’ (GMT: 1.30.2) while mystical theology, on the other hand, needs no such ‘school of the intellect’ (scola intellectus). It is acquired through the ‘school of the affect’ (scola affectus) and the exercise of the ‘moral virtues’ that ‘dispose the soul to purgation’ (GMT: 1.30.3). This for the Chancellor is through the ‘school of religion’ (scola religionis) or ‘school of love’ (scola amoris). The acquisition of the theologia mystica therefore does not require great knowledge or extensive study of books. Rather, the mystical theology may be acquired by ‘any of the faithful’ (GMT: 1.30.5). Accordingly, taking our cue from Chancellor Gerson, a group of academic researchers, contemplatives, theologians, pastoral workers and clergy gathered in September 2014 at St John’s College, Durham, within close proximity to the stunning beauty of Durham Cathedral, to see how this ancient tradition may be of relevance to Christian life and practice today. Very early in our discussions we realised that the world of medieval Paris was a long way from our own confused and confusing postmodern mélange where, to use a phrase of St Teresa of Avila, ‘a world in flames’ daily confronts issues of terrorism, violence, alienation and religious fundamentalism. Notwithstanding, as we hope you will see from this collected volume of essays inspired by the conference, mystical theology is not only very much alive but in many respects may hold the key to the solution of various issues in such diverse areas as philosophy, pastoral care, psychology, theology, gender studies and aesthetics.

Introduction  3

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, one of the foremost commentators on Orthodox theology in the West, begins our study by returning to the writings of Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) who, as we have already noted, was central to the early twentieth century renewal of interest in mystical studies, not least in his influence and mentoring of the work of Evelyn Underhill. Metropolitan Kallistos reminds us of von Hügel’s distinction between the three elements of religion: (a) the historical-traditional-institutional (‘a sacred torch race across the centuries’); (b) the intellectual-rational-speculative; and (c) the experiential-mystical. For von Hügel these correspond respectively to (a) childhood (sense and memory); (b) youth (question and argument); and (c) maturity (intuition, feeling, volition); also to Father, Son and Spirit within the Trinity. Different persons, he argues, are drawn to one specific element out of the three; von Hügel himself being particularly attracted to the mystical element – as defined earlier in this Introduction by McGinn – which he saw as fundamental to all religion. In an era dominated by fundamentalisms of all kinds this raises many interesting questions. For Ware and von Hügel mysticism is not concerned primarily with the odd, the exceptional or the miraculous, but with ‘the supremely normal’; as von Hügel puts it: ‘God … loves the average very much.’ Mystical experience is possible, he argues, for everyone; it is ‘the normal consciousness of mankind’, and there is no special faculty of mystical apprehension given to some but not to others. The true mystical attitude does not involve negative abstraction (as in Plotinus or the Platonists), but the revelation of the extraordinary in the ordinary, of the infinite in the finite. God thus becomes ‘the supremely concrete’, incomprehensible because of His fullness, not His emptiness; and so the mystical approach does not imply a flight from the world or from particularity but precisely a recognition of God’s presence in the world (panentheism, not pantheism), an appreciation of the essential beauty and lovableness of each created thing. Following upon Ware’s reflections on von Hügel another leading voice in contemporary Orthodox studies, Professor Andrew Louth, reflects on the influence of an equally important figure in the twentieth-century re-­appropriation of the mystical tradition in Orthodoxy: Vladimir Lossky (1903–1958). Born in Russia but exiled to France Lossky very early on, through his reading of Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, realised that the tradition of mystical theology would be central to any twentieth-century renewal of Christian life and thought. His magisterial tome, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, has shaped subsequent generations of scholars, not least the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams. As Louth points out, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (published in 1944) was the only book of Lossky’s published during in his lifetime. An immensely influential book, it presents Orthodox theology (or the theology of the Church of the East) as ‘mystical theology’. In this work, and the posthumously presented Théologie negative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart (1960) we see Lossky’s deep lifelong engagement with mystical theology and its consequences for Christian life today.

4  Peter Tyler et al.

In particular he concerns himself with the apophatic turn made by Dionysius and then re-interpreted by Thomas Aquinas. ‘A created intellect’, he writes in the posthumous work, whether angelic or human, can only know by its natural powers the esse determined by an essence… But the pure act of existing, “whose very essence is to exist”… remains indeterminable and cannot be named from what He is. That is why the name which is best fitted to designate God is Qui est (He who is): it names without determining.5 But as Louth tells us: for Eckhart God is Deus absconditus, the God who hides himself (Isa. 45:15), Esse absconditum, Being that hides itself: hiding itself in the inner recesses of the mind or heart, for as Augustine affirmed, addressing God in his Confessions: tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo (you were more inward than my innermost self and higher than my highest). (Confessions. III.6.11) Thus in drawing the two giants of medieval theology together – Eckhart and Aquinas – in their shared pursuit of the mystical theology, Lossky argues for the return of the mystical theology to contemporary relevance. For him: The eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between the mystical and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church… To put it another way, we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically… For the Christian, therefore, the mystical cannot exist without theology, but, above all, there is no theology without the mystical… The mystical is accordingly treated in the present work as the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence.6 This merging of theology and experience is taken up in our next chapter by Professor Corrine Saunders. Taking as her text the fascinating medieval Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiographical work in English, she examines Kempe’s remarkable account of visionary and locutionary experience. In particular she explores the multi-modal sensory quality of that experience, drawing on the insights of the contemporary interdisciplinary research project ‘Hearing the Voice’, which is investigating the phenomenon of hearing voices without external stimuli. Kempe’s inner voices and visionary experience are placed in the context of her active

Introduction  5

domestic and religious life, and of medieval religious writing, to illuminate the complex, inter-textual yet individual quality of her narrative. In so doing Saunders invites us to read Kempe anew so that we can hear the voice of this extraordinary medieval woman with new authority in a postmodern context. As she tells us: her inner eye and ear open onto rich imaginative landscapes and her homely yet profound narrative, over half a millennium on, can still speak to us of deep and immediate spiritual experience and revelation. Hers is a specifically and idiosyncratically female imitatio Christi. Her chapter is followed by two others exploring perspectives on the contemporary renewal of the contemplative tradition. Dr Bernadette Flanagan asks how far the contemporary renewal of the contemplative tradition relates to quotidian practices – von Hügel’s and Ware’s ‘supremely normal’. In particular she wonders why ‘new expressions’ of contemplative traditions are emerging at this particular historical moment, what kind of movement are these new expressions and what is the nature of their appeal. Given the wide diversity in origins, influences, styles and aims of these new contemplative expressions she suggests that such questions are difficult to answer. However, in a fascinating chapter, she considers the diverse and wide-ranging phenomena of new contemplative expressions through the lens of two key questions that have emerged in contemporary scholarship on religion. First, in what way can discussions about the ambiguous relationship between ‘spirituality and religion’ help us understand the emergence, appeal and meaning of new contemplative movements, and secondly, how might the concept of ‘lived religion’ be brought to bear in illuminating some of the characteristic means employed by new contemplative movements in seeking spiritual meaning. The ‘quotidian spirituality’ of Flanagan’s analysis of new monasticism also informs Canon Rosalind Brown’s discussion of the cathedral as ‘mystical space’ for ‘ordinary people’. Focusing on her own experiences as a Canon of Durham cathedral she reminds us of the origins of the theologia mystica in the twelfth-century Parisian schools that would ultimately give rise to the high gothic art of the Cathedral of St Denis in Paris and the work of Abbot Sugar in creating a gothic aesthetic for the theologia mystica. In her work she reminds us that people of all ages who walk into Durham cathedral for the first time often stop in their tracks and say ‘Wow!’ Even people of no faith find themselves experiencing something unexpected which they express in religious or spiritual terms. At the same time, Christians draw inspiration and strength through praying in the cathedral especially, but not only, at the shrine of St Cuthbert which has been a place of pilgrimage for centuries. For Canon Brown the cathedral is a ‘prayed-in’ place. It is loved by local people and the fact that there is no admission charge influences people’s relationship with the building. While the Cathedral Chapter does not allow questionnaires or overt research in the church, believing that people should

6  Peter Tyler et al.

be able to visit without explaining themselves, for some time she has collected stories of people’s experiences in and of the cathedral as recounted in conversation or writing. Her chapter draws on these observations to explore how people with no background in mysticism find themselves encountering something ‘other’ when they come to the cathedral and how they respond to this special sacred space. Her writing also raises questions about how the cathedral can respond to such experiences, helping to place and interpret them within a Christian framework and as such become a living example of mystical theology in action linking its origins in twelfth-century France to the contemporary world. Professor Peter Tyler, in the book’s penultimate chapter, returns to the philosophical and theological discussions that inspired Ware and Louth asking once again how the pre-modern discipline of mystical theology can provide answers to postmodern questions. To this end he takes as his conversation partners the twentieth-century Viennese analytical philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and the American Trappist monk, Thomas Merton (1915–1968). By analysing the writings of both he suggests that at the heart of their ‘mystical theology’ lies the need to change the aspect or point of view of the reader. This once again brings us back to what Wittgenstein will call the interface between ‘saying and showing’ or Gerson called the relationship between the unknowing of intellect (‘they all agree that they have come to know that they know nothing’ GMT: 1.34.3) and the ‘wisdom’ of the affect. Accordingly, taking his cue from Wittgenstein, Tyler suggests that one of the chief tasks of theology in the academy today is to see its work once again through the lens of the mystical theology of the high medieval schools. In so doing he appeals, as so many will do in this volume, for a re-integration of theory and practice as we understand the mystical theology as much as a way of acting as of speaking or writing. To this end, in their concluding chapter, Professor Chris Cook and Julienne McLean argue for the restoration of that link within the ‘living of life and especially with a life lived in the context of an experience of the Divine.’ In so doing they link the lessons of mystical theology as described by the contributors to this volume to contemporary pastoral and spiritual concerns such as the search for wellbeing and healing in prayer. In reminding us of the contemplative practices described in the book such as pilgrimage and spiritual direction they reveal new ways forward for mystical theology in the renewal of contemporary contemplative practice. Ultimately, they suggest, all theology – whether mystical, pastoral or even systematic – must lead to action. John Henry Newman famously stated that ‘God did not choose to save us through dialectics’. For the contributors to this volume theology thus becomes in its essence a transformational art – it is not a pseudo-science or an aesthetic adventure – rather the aim of theology, and especially mystical theology, is to establish the conditions-intellectually and affectively – for the Holy Spirit to act on the soul. As St John of the Cross puts it in The Living Flame of Love:

Introduction  7

When the soul frees itself of all things and attains to emptiness and dispossession concerning them, which is equivalent to what it can do of itself, it is impossible that God fail to do his part by communicating himself to it, at least silently and secretly. It is more impossible than it would be for the sun not to shine on clear and uncluttered ground. As the sun rises in the morning and shines on your house so that its light may enter if you open the shutters, so God, who in watching over Israel does not doze or, still less, sleep, will enter the soul that is empty, and fill it with divine goods. (The Living Flame of Love 3.46)7 True mystical theology, this volume argues, prepares us to receive this communication of God’s self when it must inevitably come, and hopefully to give us the wherewithal to make our way, tentatively and falteringly, to the eternal banquet to which all are invited.

Notes 1 See, for example, Rorem (1993: 214–219) and McGinn (1998). 2 The Abbey was founded by William of Champeaux, a master of the schools of Paris and described by Abelard as ‘the first dialectician of his age’, founding the abbey after retiring from the schools in 1108. He set up a small community at the site of an old hermitage on the left bank of the Seine just beyond the walls of Paris. Almost, it seems, by accident a community grew up around William who departed in 1113 to be made Bishop of Chalons. His disciple, Gilduin, was elected first Abbot of the community in the same year and under his leadership the abbey grew and flourished. Following the Rule of St Augustine, the community was at the forefront of clerical renewal through prayer, study and liturgy. 3 Although circulating in the West from the eighth century onwards, the collection of writings attributed to ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ (See Acts 17:34) had only received limited attention and irregular translation until the advent of the twelfth-century Parisian schools. Sarracenus produced his version of the ­corpus in 1166–1167, the first full translation since Eriugena, some three hundred years earlier. As Dondaine points out (1953: 64), Sarracenus used the glosses of Anastasius and Hugh of St Victor to perfect and advance his own translation. 4 Gerson wrote two treatises on the theologia mystica which both started as lectures to his Paris students: the first Speculative Treatise (Theologia Mystica Speculativa, hereafter GMT) presented in autumn 1402 and the second Practical Treatise (Theologia Mystica Practica) given five years later in 1407. 5 Théologie negative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, p. 25, trans. Louth. 6 Lossky, Mystical Theology, 8–9; trans. Louth. 7 Translation by Kavanaugh and Rodriguez 1979

Bibliography Bouyer, L. (1981) ‘Mysticism: An Essay on the History of the Word’ in R. Woods (ed.), Understanding Mysticism. London: Athlone. Dondaine, H. (1953) Le Corpus dionysien de l’université de Paris au XIIIe siècle. Rome: Edizioni di Storia et Letteratura.

8  Peter Tyler et al. Inge, W.R. (1899) Christian Mysticism. London: Methuen. John of the Cross. (1979) The Collected Works of St John of the Cross, trans. K. Kavanaugh and O. Rodriguez. Washington: Institute of Carmelite Studies. Katz, S. (1978) Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis. London: Sheldon. Lash, N. (1988) Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God. London: University of Notre Dame Press. McGinn, B. (1991) The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. Volume I: The Foundations of Mysticism. London: SCM. ———. (1994) Volume 2: Gregory the Great through the Twelfth Century. London: SCM. ———. (1998) Volume 3: The Flowering of Mysticism: Men and Women in the New Mysticism, 1200–1350. London: SCM. ———. (2005) Volume 4: The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany. New York: Herder and Herder ———. (2012) Volume 5: The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism (1350–1550). New York: Herder and Herder. ———.  (2016) Volume 6.1: Mysticism in the Reformation 1500–1650. New York: Crossroad. Rorem, P. (1982) ‘Iamblichus and the Anagogical Method in Pseudo-Dionysian ­Liturgical Theology’ in Studia Patristica, vol. 18 ed. Livingstone. Oxford: Pergamon. Tyler, P.M. and R. Woods. (2012) The Bloomsbury Guide to Christian Spirituality. ­London: Bloomsbury. Underhill, E. (1910) Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. 12th edn 1930, reprinted 1993. Oxford: Oneworld. Vaughan R.A. (1856) Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion. 3rd edn 1895. London: Gibbings and Co. von Hügel, Baron F. (1908) The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her Friends. London: Dent.

1 Baron Friedrich von Hügel on the mystical element of religion Has the Baron a message for us today? Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia Abstract Central to the spiritual teaching of Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) was his distinction between the three elements of religion: (a) the historical-­ traditional-institutional; (b) the intellectual-rational-speculative; (c) the experiential-­mystical. These correspond respectively to (a) childhood (sense and memory); (b) youth (question and argument); (c) maturity (intuition, feeling, volition); also to Father, Son and Spirit within the Trinity. Different persons feel a particular attrait to one specific element out of the three; von Hügel himself was attracted especially to the mystical element, which he saw as fundamental to all religion. Mysticism, he insisted, is not concerned primarily with the odd, the exceptional or the miraculous, but with ‘the supremely normal’. Mystical experience is possible for everyone; it is ‘the normal consciousness of mankind’, and there is no special faculty of mystical apprehension given to some but not to others. The true mystical attitude involves, not negative abstraction, but the revelation of the extraordinary in the ordinary, of the infinite in the finite.

The three elements Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) is chiefly remembered today for the threefold distinction that he drew between the different elements of religion: the historical, the rational and the mystical. There is first what he terms the historical-traditional-institutional element: ‘this sacred torch-race across the ages’, as he styles it.1 Next there is the rational-intellectual-speculative element: ­‘Religion here becomes Thought, System, a Philosophy’, he writes.2 Thirdly, there is the experiential-mystical element: in the Baron’s words, ‘Here religion is rather felt than seen or reasoned about, is loved and lived rather than analyzed.’3 These three elements correspond respectively, so von Hügel argues, to the three ages of our human development: to childhood, to youth and to maturity. In childhood we rely chiefly on what we are told by others, on authority, on external facts, on what we see and remember; and this may be likened to

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the historical element of religion. In youth we begin to test what we are told, to challenge it through question and answer; and this may be equated with the rational element. In maturity we make greater use of intuition, feeling and volition; and this is similar to the experiential or mystical element. Summarizing the three aspects or stages, von Hügel observes: ‘I believe because I am told [childhood], because it is true [youth], because it answers to my deepest interior experiences and needs [maturity].’4 Alternatively, the three elements can each be linked with a particular person of the Trinity: God the Father and Creator is conceived as corresponding to the sense-perception and Imagination, to Memory-power; God the Son and Redeemer, as the Logos, to our reason; and God the Holy Spirit, as corresponding to the effective-volitional force within us.5 There are intriguing parallels here with C.G. Jung’s essay, ‘A Psychological Approach to the Trinity’, where the Father corresponds to the stage of the child, the Son to the process of self-individuation and the emergence of ego-consciousness, and the Spirit to the embracing of the unconscious. But the Baron would scarcely have wished to follow Jung in expanding the Trinity into a quaternity, by including either the Blessed Virgin Mary or the devil!6 Different persons, so von Hügel is convinced, feel a particular attrait to one specific element out of the three. He himself was attracted especially to the mystical element, which he saw as fundamental to all religion. But he insists that all three elements are necessary for a balanced personhood or a balanced religious faith. They are complementary, not mutually exclusive. It is important to avoid an excessive emphasis upon one element at the expense of the other two. This leads him to draw attention to what he sees as certain dangers: Women generally tend either to an excess of the external, to superstition [i.e. a distortion of the first element]; or of the emotional, to fanaticism [i.e. a distortion of the third element]. Men, on the contrary, appear generally to incline to an excess of the intellectual, to rationalism and indifference [i.e. a distortion of the second element] … The Latin races [tend] to Externalism and Superstition; the Teutonic races, to the two Interiorisms, Rationalism and Fanaticism.7 Here von Hügel surely falls into sexual and racial stereotypes that are less acceptable today than they would have been a hundred years ago. Perhaps fortunately, he does not attempt to classify the Orthodox peoples, whether Greek or Slav. The Baron goes on to apply this threefold pattern to world religions, in a somewhat schematic fashion; but at the same time it has to be acknowledged that everything he says is based on his profound and wide-ranging reading on the subject. Brahmanism, in his view, has overemphasized the first element, the institutional or traditionalist. Buddhism displays an excess of ‘abstruse

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reasoning and pessimistic emotion’ (an overemphasis on the second and third elements). Islam, while combining all three elements, lays particular stress upon the first, the external element; and, at any rate in the person of its strictly orthodox representatives, it treats with suspicion the third or mystical element.8 (Presumably von Hügel would make an exception here in the case of the Sufis.) All three elements, according to von Hügel, are evident in Judaism at the time of Christ: the Pharisees exemplify the first (‘external, traditional, authoritative’), the Sadducees the second (‘accommodating and rationalizing’), and the Essenes the third (‘experimental, ascetical and mystical’).9 Within Christianity, Abbot Joachim of Fiore ‘gives us the intuitional-emotive element [the third element] in a … purified, institutionally and rationally supplemented form’.10 The Quakers likewise manifest a predominance of the third element. The Baron thought highly of them: ‘The “Society of Friends”… measured by the smallness of its numbers, has given to the world an astonishingly large band of devoted lovers of humankind.’11 On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church of his day had in his opinion inclined too far in the institutional direction.12

‘Religion can’t be clear’ Among the three elements, let us look in closer detail at the third, the mystical element. But, before we do so, let us consider three other points, which will enable us to place in context his assessment of this mystical element: First, his understanding of truth as a bright light, surrounded by darkness; Second, his dialectical approach, insisting always on the ‘friction’ of opposites; Third, his interpretation of religion as a combination of external fact and inner experience. 1. Truth as a bright light. The Abbé Henri Huvelin, the French priest who acted as spiritual director to von Hügel, wrote to him: ‘Truth for you is a radiant point of light which gradually fades off into darkness.’13 The Baron himself used the same analogy: The deeper we get into any reality, the more numerous will be the questions we cannot answer. For myself I cannot conceive truth, or rather reality, as a geometrical figure of luminous lines, within which is sheer truth, and outside of which is sheer error; but I have to conceive such reality as light, in its centre blindingly luminous, having rings around it of lesser and lesser light, growing dimmer and dimmer until we are left in utter darkness … Although the realm of light can and will be indefinitely enlarged, yet its borders will continue fringed – they will never be clear-cut frontiers.14 The conclusion which von Hügel draws from this is that we should be firm at the centre, while remaining free at the periphery.15 Alas! All too often in our case the opposite is true: we are fierce and intransigent at the periphery, but vague and woolly at the centre.

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Truth, then, understood in its deeper and more personal dimensions, is not to be envisaged exclusively in terms of Euclidian geometry. It is not merely a collection of proofs, systematic and exhaustive, that admit of no hesitation and uncertainty, and that compel our assent. Often light is combined with darkness, faith with doubt, conviction with self-questioning. There is a kind of logical certainty that in the religious sphere we cannot attain and should not seek. The Baron had always an aversion to oversimplification and false clarity. Our knowledge of other people, he maintains, is ‘most subtle and complex … most rich and vivid, but distinctly not simple and “clear”’; and if this is the case with our knowledge of others it is far more so with our understanding of religious truth.16 As he said to his niece, Gwendolen Greene, ‘Never try to get things too clear. Religion can’t be clear.’17 For von Hügel faith always involves risk, adventure, a ‘leap’ into the unknown, as envisaged by Kierkegaard, a philosopher he always admired. The Baron insists, in the passage quoted above, that ‘the deeper we get into any reality, the more numerous will be the questions we cannot answer’. God, to adapt a phrase of St Paul (2 Cor. 6:9), is ‘well known’ to us, but he is also ‘unknown’; and paradoxically the more we know him, the more we appreciate that he is beyond our understanding. So von Hügel writes to the philosophical theologian C.C.J. Webb, What I cannot abide, is any view that would make man contain God, instead of God contain man: we shall ever have to look up to God, to apprehend Him, not comprehend Him; and our reason will never become the Reason.18 He quoted with approval the words of St John of the Cross: ‘They who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly that He is infinitely incomprehensible.’19 God, he states, is ‘the Transcendent yet also Immanent Spirit, effecting in the human spirit the ever-increasing apprehension of Himself, accompanied in this spirit by an ever keener sense of His incomprehensibility for all but Himself.’20 Citing St Catherine of Genoa, he writes, ‘All that can be said of God, compared to the great Reality, is but tiny crumbs from the great Master’s table.’21 Yet, if we cannot grasp God by intellection, we can approach him through love. On the primacy of love von Hügel insists with firm emphasis. This sense of the divine mystery leads him to underline the value of silence. ‘Be silent about great things’, he writes to his niece; ‘let them grow inside you … Before all greatness, be silent – in art, in music, in religion: silence.’22 In this appreciation of God’s unknowability and of the value of silence, von Hügel shows himself to be a genuinely apophatic theologian. This is immediately relevant for an appreciation of his view of the mystical element of religion. 2. The ‘friction’ of opposites. Writing to his friend George Tyrrell, the former Jesuit, von Hügel says characteristically, ‘And then I feel sure too that, somehow, ever two things and not simply one have to be attended to.’23 Bearing in mind his threefold distinction of the elements of religion, he might also

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have said ‘ever three things’. But, whether one speaks of ‘three’ or ‘two’, the basic point is the same. Truth for him is not unilateral or one-dimensional. His approach is dialectical or antinomic. Truth lies in ‘friction’ – a favourite word of his – in a tension between different poles, in a tension that is ‘costing’ (another of his favourite words), exigent but creative. Bearing in mind the principle ‘ever two things and not simply one’, he envisaged truth not as a circle but as an ellipse: ‘Christianity embraces a polarity within itself, and its formula must be dualistic: it resembles, not a circle with one centre, but an ellipse with two focusses.’24 Where others might prefer aut-aut (either-or), says the Baron, he prefers et-et (both-and). This ‘coincidence of opposites’ recurs throughout von Hügel’s writings. ‘Good Friday and Easter Sunday,’ he insists, the two together, each requiring the other and we all requiring both – only this twin fact gives us Christianity … We will all, please God, see this more and more every year that these bitter-sweet, contraction-­ expansion, sacrifice-serenity great days come round.25 God is the Wholly Other,26 ‘this grand Over-againstness’, as von Hügel puts it,27 yet he is also uniquely close to us. By the same token he describes Christ through a series of contrasts: ‘so unspeakably rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above us precisely in being so divinely near’.28 Again and again he delights in antithesis. Our piety should be both ‘humble and daring’.29 ‘The great rule is, Variety up to the verge of dissipation: Recollection up to the verge of emptiness.’30 For myself I must have both movements: the palace of my soul must have somehow two lifts – a lift which is always going up from below, and a lift which is always going down from above. I must both be seeking and be having. I must both move and repose.31 More radically, he asserts that Heaven and Hell coexist in each individual soul.32 While our personal life is marked by antinomies, so also is the life of the Church as a whole: The Church is thus, ever and everywhere, both progressive and conservative; both reverently free-lance and official; both as it were male and female, creative and reproductive; both daring to the verge of presumption, and prudent to the verge of despair.33 If von Hügel is rightly to be considered an apophatic theologian, then he is equally a dialectical theologian. 3. Religion as fact and experience. Faithful to his principle, ‘ever two things and not simply one’, von Hügel discerns in religion a fundamental contrast: it is at one and the same time ‘the deepest of all experiences and the deepest of all facts’.34 ‘Religion’, he states, ‘consists centrally in the sense of Presence – the

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sense of an overflowing Existence distinct from our own and in the Adoration of the same.’35 ‘An overflowing Existence distinct from our own’: here he emphasizes the objective aspect of religion. As he puts it, ‘The Otherness, the Prevenience of God, the One-sided Relation between God and man, these constitute the deepest measure and touchstone of all religion.’36 In this way he stresses the independent isness of religion; we are not to reduce religion to subjective immanentism. Yet at the same time he gives full value to the inner and personal aspect of religion, to the experience of prayer and worship. ‘Religion is adoration’, he affirms; 37 ‘You can’t have religion without adoration.’38 So he regards religion as, quite simply, ‘the act of attention directed upon God’.39

The mystical element This double emphasis upon both fact and experience, upon both the outer and the inner, helps us to appreciate what von Hügel meant by ‘the mystical element’. For many people ‘mysticism’ signifies the study of various paranormal psycho-physical states: ecstasy, trances, visions, voices, levitation, stigmatization, telepathy, and the like. For von Hügel, however, such experiences are ‘but means and not ends’; they are of value ‘only in proportion as they convey some spiritual truth of importance’.40 What matters, that is to say, is not the subjective experience as such, but the objective truth which that experience mediates. In this way, mysticism is not primarily the study of the paranormal, not a branch of religious psychology, but an expression of theological fact concerning the relation between God and the human person. Of the three elements of religion, the historical, the rational and the mystical, it was to the third that von Hügel was most attracted, and he saw it as the most important of the three. Speaking of God, he maintains: He it is Who, however dimly yet directly, touches our souls and awakens them … to that noblest, incurable discontent with our own petty self and to that sense of and thirst for the Infinitive and Abiding, which articulates man’s deepest requirement and characteristic.41 Our human potentiality for direct communion with the living God: that was what he saw as our ‘deepest requirement and characteristic’. Thus mystical experience is to be seen, not as something strange and peculiar, but as an expression of ‘the innermost normal consciousness of mankind’.42 Mystical experience, he insists, is possible for all without exception; there is no special faculty of mystical apprehension that is given to some and not to others. ‘The true exceptional’, he says, ‘is thus never the queer, but the supremely normal’;43 ‘The material of the Supernatural is not only the heroic but also, indeed mostly, the homely.’44 It is necessary, states von Hügel, to get rid of too hard and fast a line – most of ours [i.e. Roman Catholics] have dug as deep a trench as possible – between contemplative, mystical

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acts and states, and the acts of the ordinary spiritual and even mental life. Mysticism, indeed, anything and everything, becomes profoundly uninteresting, and indeed a pure and simple irritant, except it be conceived as existing, in some form and degree, in every mind. Only in its intensity and extension, in its quantity and quality will it then differ in various souls.45 Mysticism, then, as an expression of the ‘supremely normal’ is primarily concerned, not with the extraordinary, but with the ordinary; more exactly, the mystic is one who discerns the extraordinary in the ordinary. A distinction is to be drawn between the mystical and the miraculous. ‘Le miracle m’est très antipathique’, said von Hügel’s mentor Abbé Huvelin: ‘The miraculous is completely antipathetic to me.’46 The Baron might not have gone as far as this. But he drew a threefold distinction between nature, non-miraculous supernature and strict miracle. Mysticism involves the second level rather than the third. Its subject matter is the working of supranatural grace in and through our created human nature. In this connection, von Hügel draws an important distinction between what he terms ‘Exclusive’ and ‘Inclusive’ mysticism. Exclusive mysticism proceeds by a process of negative abstraction, Inclusive by a process of synthesis. Exclusive mysticism is associated above all with Plotinus (c.205–279); within the Christian tradition a notable exponent is Clement of Alexandria (c.150–215). Imagine a body, writes Clement.47 Then take away from it all its physical qualities (depth, breadth, length). What is left? A unit, possessing position. Now take away the idea of position. What then remains? The notion of a simple Monad. Next take away also the notion of the One or the Monad, for God is beyond even this. What then are you left with? Some of us might answer: Nothing. Clement, however, concludes that we are left with the idea of Pure Being, that is to say, with God. In Clement’s words, God is ‘beyond the One and above the very Monad itself ’.48 He is ‘ineffable’, ‘beyond all speech, beyond every concept and every thought’;49 he is not in space, but ‘above both place and time and name and thought’, 50 ‘without limits, without form … without name’ – God the anonymous!51 In the words of Henry Chadwick, ‘Clement’s language about the via negativa goes as far as anyone could go towards the apotheosis of the alpha privative.’52 God has become, in the words of George Tyrrell, ‘a crystal ball suspended in vacuo’.53 The mystical quest can thus be defined, in the celebrated phrase of Plotinus, as ‘a flight of the alone to the Alone’, escape in solitude to what is solitary.54 This is not at all the way in which von Hügel understands the mystical element of religion. He does not deny the need for abstraction, but at the same time he believes that Christian faith in the Incarnation, along with the sacramental principle that governs the life of the Church, require us to affirm ‘a double process: occupation with the concrete and then abstraction from it, and this – alternately on and on’.55 God is not the Ens abstractissimum of Neoplatonic contemplation, but the Ens determinatissimum or, more exactly,

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concretissimum. God, that is to say, is ‘the supremely concrete, supremely individual and particular’.56 He is ‘a stupendously rich reality’,57 incomprehensible not because of his emptiness but by virtue of his very fullness. ‘The whole of Negative Theology’, he maintains, ‘is but an attempt to utter vividly this stupendous richness of God’;58 the mystic’s negative statements about God are in fact a super-affirmation. Here, as elsewhere, von Hügel seeks to hold in balance two contrasting truths. There is in God ‘stupendous richness’, but there is also simplicity and unity. The living reality of God, he says, is ‘bafflingly simple in its paradoxical, mysterious richness’.59 The mystical quest, he insists, is a search for ‘the greatest possible Multiplicity in the deepest possible Unity’.60 ‘Can there be anything more sublimely, utterly simple than religion?’ he asks; and he replies, ‘In these regions, if anywhere, we long and thirst to see and find all things in one, to become ourselves one, to find the One Thing necessary, the One God, and to be one with Him for ever.’ Christ is ‘supremely, uniquely great, just because of His sublime simplicity!’61 Yet Christ also embraces in his human nature, alongside this ‘sublime simplicity’, all the pluriform variety of our created existence. In him the one and the many are entirely reconciled. The mystical theology of von Hügel, then, is not exclusive but inclusive, not world-denying but world-affirming. Mysticism, properly understood in a Christian sense, does not signify a one-sided flight from the created world or from particularity, but is thoroughly consistent with a commitment to exact historical and scientific inquiry. Indeed, he saw such factual inquiry as possessing a specifically spiritual value; it forms a bracing and purifying discipline. That is why the Baron made his niece study history, precisely because it would help her in her life of prayer. He respected Darwin because of his humility in the face of facts. But I wonder what he would have thought of Richard Dawkins.

Mystical panentheism ‘The Infinite’, writes von Hügel, can still find room for the Historical and Institutional elements of Religions, and, at the same time, for that noble concentration upon not directly religious contingent facts and happenings, and upon laws of causation or of growth, which constitutes the scientific temper of mind and its specific irreplaceable duties and virtues.62 It is important not to lose sight of what von Hügel terms the ‘thing-element’, ‘the reality of finites’. He himself supplemented his theological studies by a keen interest in geology, and at the relatively advanced age of fifty-seven he even acquired a set of new geological books and a geological hammer.63 The Baron was always aware of the need not to isolate the mystical element of religion, but always to combine it with the other two elements, the historical-­institutional and the intellectual-rational. As soon as the mystical

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element claims to be not a part but the whole of religion, it becomes a ‘dangerous error’.64 He rejected ‘pure’ mysticism, the kind of mysticism that is narrowly ‘other-worldly’, ignoring the ‘this-worldly’ aspect of the mystical element, and he thought that such mysticism inevitably led to pantheism: ‘The fact is that Pure Mysticism is but Pantheism.’65 In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Baron asserts, the main threat to religion had been ‘Materialism and Agnosticism’; in the early twentieth century it was now ‘Pantheism’.66 What, we may ask, would he consider the main threat today? When speaking of pantheism, von Hügel makes a distinction between this and what he terms panentheism. There is a wide difference between the two. The pantheist says, ‘The world is God, and God is the world’; and this is not a Christian option. The panentheist, on the other hand, says, ‘The world is in God, and God is in the world’; and this is exactly von Hügel’s position. The panentheist, that is to say, ‘whilst ever holding the definite creatureliness of the soul, in all its reaches, puts God Himself into the soul and the soul into God’.67 ‘The spirit, for you, is a spirit of benediction upon every creature’, said Abbé Huvelin to von Hügel.68 Such precisely is the approach of the panentheist: an attitude of worldly adoration. The mystical panentheist is acutely sensitive to the intrinsic lovableness of created things; he treats the entire cosmos as a sacrament of the divine presence. The ultimate is mediated through specific persons, objects, and moments of time. The mystic values each thing for what it is in itself, and at the same time treats each thing as transparent, pointing beyond itself to the Transcendent and Eternal. The name of William Blake does not appear in the index to The Mystical Element of Religion, but von Hügel’s attitude is certainly close to that of Blake: To see a World in a Grain of Sand, And a heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour. The Baron’s panentheist stance also recalls the threefold pattern of the Christian pilgrimage adumbrated by Patristic authors such as Origen, Evagrius of Pontus, and Maximus the Confessor, although von Hügel does not himself note this connection. (In fact, his works contain few references to Greek ecclesiastical writers apart from Origen and Dionysius the Areopagite; there is nothing in him that corresponds to the ‘Neo-Patristic Synthesis’ of an Orthodox thinker such as Fr Georges Florovsky.) Origen, Evagrius and Maximus posited three stages or levels in the Christian life: first, the ‘active’ life, praxis or praktiki, the struggle to purify the passions and to acquire the virtues; second, physiki, ‘natural’ contemplation, the contemplation of God in nature and of nature in God; and third, theologia, the image-free contemplation of God, above and beyond the created order. The panentheist approach of von Hügel surely corresponds to the second of these three stages. ‘Natural’ contemplation is the vision of the Deity as immanent, whereas theologia is the

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vision – or more exactly the non-vision – of God as transcendent. The Baron has much to say about both divine immanence and divine transcendence. With his love for the world of nature – his writings abound in references to dogs and bees, to butterflies and tree frogs – von Hügel may rightly be regarded as a true Christian humanist. ‘God’, he states, ‘is the author of, and God is variously reflected in, all (innocent) Nature as well as in all Supernature.’69 To those under his direction he emphasised the need for a wide range of non-ecclesiastical interests. Although not particularly sensitive to art and music, he was a keen reader of poetry, and had a special enthusiasm for Browning. He admired the breadth and balance of such figures as Dante, Thomas More and Samuel Johnson, while expressing a sharp dislike of Puritan rigorism and ‘little churchinesses’. He never forgot Huvelin’s warning: ‘Christianity has no enemy deeper or more dangerous than whatever tends to diminish it and make it narrow.’ 70 In this connection the Abbé also urged, ‘Never read religious journals.’ 71

Does God suffer? The God of von Hügel is pre-eminently a God of love, transcendent, indeed, yet also deeply involved in his creation. ‘Love makes others’ sufferings its own’, it is said in the fourteenth-century mystical text The Book of the Poor in Spirit.72 Might this not have led him to affirm that God, as a God of love, shares in our sufferings and makes them his own? Von Hügel certainly upheld the generally accepted Christian view that Christ, the eternal Son of God, underwent genuine suffering during his earthly life; he suffered, that is to say, in his human but not in his divine nature. But was von Hügel willing to go beyond this, and to say that the second Person of the Trinity suffered before his incarnation, and that God the Father suffered with him? Origen, Hellenist though he was, came to recognize at the end of his life that there is indeed a place for our human suffering in the transcendent life of God. In his sixth homily on Ezekiel, he writes of Christ: By our affections he was affected, before he was affected by the sufferings of the cross and condescended to take our flesh upon him. Had he not been affected, he would not have entered into association with the life of men. First he is affected; then he comes down and is seen. What is that affection whereby on our account he is affected? It is the affection of love. Thus, according to Origen, Christ’s participation in the suffering of the world is not the result of the Incarnation, but its cause. Origen then goes yet further than this, and asserts that the first Person of the Trinity is also subject to suffering: The Father himself, too, the God of the Universe, long suffering, and of great compassion, full of pity, is not he in a manner liable to affection? … The very Father is not impassible, without affection … He experiences an affection of love.73

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Does von Hügel agree? In his essay ‘Suffering and God’, he quotes C.S. Dinsmore: There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside Jerusalem. And now that the cross of wood has been taken down, the one in the heart of God abides, and it will remain so as long as there is one sinful soul for whom to suffer.74 Yet von Hügel cites these eloquent words only to disagree with them. He sums up his own attitude in the words of St Bernard: ‘Though God is incapable of suffering, He is not incapable of compassion.’75 ‘We will hold’, he writes, ‘that there exists the deepest compassio, but no passio in God.’76 The Baron, however, does not clearly explain precisely in what way passio and compassio differ from one another. Surely there can be no deep and dynamic compassion without co-suffering? He comes to the conclusion that God does not suffer for two reasons: first, because he connects suffering with sin; second, and more fundamentally, because he believes that God is pure joy, ‘Joy perfect and unutterable’.77 Yet, applying his principle of ‘ever two things and not simply one’, might he not have said, by virtue of the ‘coincidence of opposites’, that in God there is both perfect joy and perfect suffering? Here with reluctance I have to part company with von Hügel, although indebted to him in so many other ways.

Conclusion The more I read the writings of von Hügel, the more sharply I regret – since I was born nine years after he died – that I never had the chance to meet him face to face. What impressed his friends was not only the power and profundity of his writings but, much more, the remarkable effect made by his character and individuality. ‘He is the most wonderful personality I have ever known’, stated the Anglican author on spirituality Evelyn Underhill after his death; she recalled ‘an Alpine quality’ in him, and she noted especially the ‘awe and passion’ with which he uttered the name of God. ‘The Baron was amazingly modest’, said another who knew him well, Claude Montefiore. ‘… so appreciative, so ready to learn from anybody. His friendship made one proud, but it also humbled … Somehow for such souls as his, one seems to need God to account for them.’78

Notes 1 von Hügel (1930), p. 246. 2 von Hügel (1908), vol. 1, p. 52. Citations, unless otherwise indicated, are from this first edition. 3 Op. cit., vol. 1, p. 53. 4 Op.cit., vol. 1, p. 54. 5 Op.cit., vol. 1, p. 66. 6 Jung (1981), pp. 107–200, especially pp. 181–184. 7 von Hügel (1908), vol.1, pp. 58–59.

20  Metropolitan Kallistos Ware of Diokleia 8 Op.cit., vol. 1. p. 60. 9 Op.cit., vol. 1. p. 61. 10 Op.cit., vol. 2. p. 391. 11 Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 392. But von Hügel also stresses what he sees as the one-­ sidedness of the Quakers: see von Hügel (1930), pp. 84–86. 12 See ‘Memoir’ in Holland (1927), p. 30. 13 von Hügel, in Holland (1927), p. 58. 14 von Hügel (1931), p. 33. 15 See Steere, ed. (1964), p. 27. 16 von Hügel (1928), pp. 101–102. 17 Greene (1928), p. xvi. 18 Holland (1927), p. 138 (italics in the original). 19 von Hügel (1908), vol. 2, p. 51. 20 Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 50. 21 Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 50. 22 Greene (1928), p. x. 23 Holland (1927), p. 152 (italics in the original). 24 von Hügel (1908), vol. 2, p. 359 (quoting Ernst Troeltsch). 25 Holland (1927), p. 303. 26 I take this phrase from Rudolf Otto, not from von Hügel himself. 27 Holland (1927), p. 347. 28 von Hügel (1908), vol. 1, p. 26. 29 Op. cit., vol. 1, p. xv. 30 Greene (1928), p. xxi (italics in the original). 31 Holland (1927), p. 354. 32 Petre (1937), p. 59. 33 von Hügel (1930), p. 17. 34 von Hügel (1923), vol. 1, p. xviii. 35 von Hügel (1931), p. 71. 36 von Hügel (1923), vol. 1, p. xvi. 37 Holland (1927), p. 51. 38 Greene (1928), p. xxxiv. 39 Albert Cock, summarizing von Hügel: Chambers (1945), p. 28. 40 von Hügel (1908), vol. 1, p. 47. 41 Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 395. 42 Op. cit., vol. 2, p. 358 (my italics). 43 Petre (1937), p. 31. 44 Chambers (1945), p. 11. 45 Holland (1927), p. 84. 46 Op. cit., p. 62. 47 Clement, Stromateis v, 11 (71, 2–3). 48 Paidagogos I, 8 (71, 1). 49 Stromateis v, 10 (65, 2). 50 Stromateis v, 11 (71, 5). 51 Stromateis v, 12 (81, 6). 52 Chadwick (1967), p. 179. 53 Petre (1937), p. 36. 54 Enneads VI, ix, 11. These are the concluding words in the Enneads. 55 Petre (1937), p. 32. 56 Op. cit., p. 35. 57 von Hügel (1930), p. 217. 58 Op. cit., p. 218. 59 von Hügel (1908), vol. 1, p. 243. 60 Op. cit., vol. 1, p. 67.

Baron Friedrich von Hügel  21 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78

Op. cit., vol. 1, p. 65. Op. cit., vol. 1, pp. vi–vii. Chambers (1945), p. 18. von Hügel (1931), p. 91. von Hügel (1930), p. 233. Op. cit., p. 137. von Hügel (1908), vol. 2, p. 336. Holland (1927), p. 62. von Hügel (1930), p. 218. Holland (1927), p. 61. Op. cit., p. 58. Kelley, trans. (1955), IV, iv, 2. Tollinton, trans. (1929), pp. 15–16. von Hügel (1930), p. 173. Op. cit., p. 194. Op. cit., p. 223. Op. cit., p. 193. Quoted by Holland (1927), pp. 34–36.

Bibliography Chadwick, H. (1967) ‘Philo and the Beginnings of Christian Thought’, in A.H. Armstrong (ed.), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, P.F. (1945) Baron von Hügel Man of God. An Introductory Anthology Compiled with a Biographical Preface. London: Geoffrey Bles/The Centenary Press. Greene, G., ed. (1928) Letters from Baron Friedrich von Hügel to a Niece. London/­ Toronto: J.M. Dent. Holland, B., ed. (1927) Baron Friedrich von Hügel: Selected Letters 1896–1924. London/ Toronto/New York: J.M. Dent/E.P. Dutton. Jung, C.G. (1981) ‘A Psychological Approach to the Trinity’, in Psychology and Religion: East and West, The Collected Works, vol. 11, 2nd edn. London/Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kelley, C.F. (1955) The Book of the Poor in Spirit. London: Longmans, Green & Co.. Petre, M.D. (1937) Von Hügel and Tyrrell: The Story of a Friendship. London: J.M. Dent. Steere, Douglas V., ed. (1964) Spiritual Counsels and Letters of Baron Friedrich von Hügel. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Tollinton, R.B., trans. (1929) Selections from the Commentaries and Homilies of Origen. London: SPCK. von Hügel, F. (1908) The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her Friends, 1st edn. London/New York: J.M. Dent/E.P. Dutton. von Hügel, F. (1923) The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her Friends, 2nd edn. London/New York: J.M. Dent/E.P. Dutton. von Hügel, F. (1928) Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, First Series. London/Toronto/New York: J.M. Dent/E.P. Dutton. von Hügel, F. (1930) Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion, Second Series. London/Toronto/New York: J.M. Dent/E. P. Dutton. von Hügel, F. (1931) The Reality of God and Religion and Agnosticism. London/­Toronto/ New York: J.M. Dent/E.P. Dutton.

2 What did Vladimir Lossky mean by ‘mystical theology’? Andrew Louth

Abstract Vladimir Lossky’s Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église orthodoxe (1944) is the principal work of one of the most important Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century. Mysticism was in the air, and this paper begins by filling in the background, so as to give some idea of what ‘mystical theology’ might have meant to the first readers of the book. Lossky’s own thinking about mystical theology is found in his research on Meister Eckhart, which occupied him throughout his life, finding expression in his Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart, published posthumously (1960). Moving from this discussion this paper explores the treatment of la mystique in the earlier book, and suggests that, though Lossky was fully aware of the notion of the mystical as concerned with the inward, he reinterprets this in terms of an inward experience of the sacramental life of the Church, the true mysterium, Christ present in the Church through the Holy Spirit, which validates the notion of la mystique.

Introduction Vladimir Lossky’s book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Lossky 1957) is without question his most famous book, indeed it is the only book of his published in his lifetime. It was originally published in French as Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’orient in 1944, based on some lectures he had given in the immediately preceding months (Lossky 2005, ii). It was translated into English in 1957, just before his untimely death in the following year. For many of us, this was our first introduction to Orthodox theology; over the years since it has been published – seventy years now – it has been much criticized, but it seems to me that these criticisms are like the bites of midges, a bit irritating, but not making much impact on the work itself. The secondary literature on Lossky has been pretty slight. Rowan Williams wrote a brilliant doctoral thesis on Lossky in the early 1970s; it has not appeared in English, save for a chapter published as an article (Williams 2007), though it has come out in a Russian translation. Olivier Clément wrote a distinguished

‘Mystical theology’?  23

essay on him (Clément 1985), but otherwise there has been very little (but see Stavrou 2014; Louth 2015, 94–110). It seems to me that the first question we might ask is what Lossky might have expected his, mostly Western, readers to have understood by the reference to ‘théologie mystique’ in the title of his book; what would the term suggest to a reader of the book in 1944, when it was published? Then I suggest two strategies: the first, to look at how he understands the term ‘théologie mystique’ in his great doctoral thesis on Eckhart, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart (Lossky 1960), a work that preoccupied him, alongside other matters, for most of his life; and then, in the light of all this, to look directly at his Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient.

Mysticism in the air Mysticism was very much in the air when Lossky gave his lectures in Paris towards the end of the Second World War, and had been since the beginning of the century. This was a European (and North American) phenomenon. In England in the first part of the twentieth-century works on mysticism were published by, for instance, Baron von Hügel and Evelyn Underhill, for some time his spiritual daughter. The Baron’s most famous work was his The Mystical Element of Religion as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends (Hügel 1911). The case of Evelyn Underhill is particularly significant for our purposes, for in the course of her life (she died at the beginning of the war, in 1941) she moved from a rather undogmatic interest in mysticism, taking mystical states and phenomena as more or less the same in all religions, to a strong sense of the Church, and the place of the mystical within the institution of the Church and its sacraments, which involved an appreciation of dogma. The first phase is represented by her early book, Mysticism (Underhill 1911), a remarkable book in its own way for its sympathetic understanding of a wide variety of traditions, though all these traditions are arranged as if they were all concerned with a common mystical path; the final phase by her book, Worship (Underhill 1936), which roots the mystical much more firmly in the sacramental worship and life of the Church (it also is strikingly ecumenical in its approach, equally sensitive to the worship of the Orthodox and the Quakers). It was indeed the Baron who helped her to see the point, indeed indispensability, of the Church and belonging to the Church, so that in the 1920s she moved from a kind of unattached Catholicism (she was very keen on the service of Benediction, but was not a communicant) to firm commitment to the Church of England. A sense of the importance of worship and the mystical is also to be found in the heart of academic Germany in the famous work of the Marburg professor, Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige (Otto 1917), which had immense influence. His intellectual career was rather almost the reverse of Underhill’s: a later major work of his was West-Östliche Mystik (1926), in which he tended to assimilate Christian mysticism into the

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traditions of India. Another learned German who belongs to this world was Friedrich Heiler, whose first major book was Das Gebet (Heiler 1919). His path was somewhat similar to Underhill’s: from being a Protestant, his ecclesial sense led him to become a Roman Catholic, and his last work, Urkirche und Ostkirche (Heiler 1937), on which he continued working for the rest of his life (he died in 1967), and which was published posthumously under the title, Die Ostkirchen (Heiler 1971), bears witness to a prolonged interest in the Eastern Orthodox Churches. This indicates the wider world within which Lossky was writing: there was an interest in ‘mysticism’, which was, however, coming less to mean strange, paranormal experiences of visions and levitations, but rather a sense of an experienced religion, that experience not being isolated from the sacramental life of the Church. Coming closer home, as it were, something similar can be found in Catholic France, with the difference that the sacramental had always been appreciated, in some way. There was, however, something of a shift in the understanding of mysticism, partly, I expect, as a reaction against a non-dogmatic interest in mysticism that had become universal in Europe at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth century. France, too, had a long tradition of ‘mysticism’, which Henri Bremond had expounded, elegantly and at length, in his Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France (Bremond 1916– 1933). Mention of Bremond reminds one of the importance of the so-called Catholic modernists in setting the scene for many of the theological concerns of the twentieth century; Baron von Hügel belonged to their number, too. An issue that came to the fore in twentieth-century France was whether the ‘higher’ forms of prayer – beyond the Dark Night of the Soul and into the Spiritual Marriage, to use the terminology, of largely Carmelite inspiration, that was current – were to be regarded as a normal blossoming of a serious Christian life, or whether they were a rare gift for specially devout souls. That issue could be put: is ‘mysticism’ for all? One can see a clear move in writers such as Saudreau (Saudreau 1921) and Poulain (Poulain 1921; but use the eleventh edition, 1931) towards seeing ‘mystical union’ with God as the normal goal of the Christian life, however, uncommon. If ‘mysticism’ is for all, then the sacramental life, which is certainly for all, need not be hived off from the higher flights of prayer, but can be seen as integral to the attaining of such a state of union with God. Another important book, which focused the notion of mysticism in another way, was Jean Baruzi’s Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique (Baruzi 1931; the first edition must have been 1924 or 1925 to judge by the intense interest manifest in reviews and articles in 1925). This was the first book to approach St John of the Cross from a purely scholarly point of view and focused, as the title makes clear, on the question of mystical experience. Mysticism was, then, much in the air, especially in France, when Lossky was giving his lectures, despite the concerns of the war and the Occupation, in which Lossky was himself involved, playing his part in the resistance.

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Contemporary mystical writing There are two other things I want to mention. First, the importance of some books published around the time that Lossky published his Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Just before the war, Dom Anselm Stolz had given a retreat to the Benedictines of Amay at Chevetogne; the lectures were published as Théologie de la Mystique (Stolz 1947; I don’t know when the first edition was published) posthumously (Dom Anselm had died in 1942). The title is significant, as were the contents: the lectures are largely patristic, regarding the life of prayer as the return to paradise, a return that cannot be simply individual, but involves the whole Church. Also in 1944, the same year as the publication of Lossky’s book (and from the same press), there was published a work by a young Jesuit scholar, Jean Daniélou, Platonisme et théologie mystique (Daniélou 1944): the major work in the mid-twentieth century on St Gregory of Nyssa, marking (together with works of his then fellow Jesuit, Hans Urs von Balthasar, which included Balthasar 1942, though his Kosmische Liturgie. Maximus der Bekenner. Höhe und Krise des griechischen Weltbilds [Balthasar 1941], was probably more influential) a new approach to the Fathers, drawn to the work of the individual Fathers as a whole, and not just as witnesses to the developing conciliar tradition. In these works we find a more defined sense of what is better called the ‘mystical’: better than ‘mysticism’, and certainly closer to the French, ‘la mystique’, which Lossky also uses, for it really has little to do with ‘mysticism’, in its still common sense of something unusual and esoteric, but with the deepening of a life of prayer within the sacramental life of the Church. Another book we might mention is one by Lossky’s mentor, Étienne Gilson, La Théologie mystique de saint Bernard (Gilson 1947), on which Gilson was likely to have been working, as his academic disciple was writing the lectures that became the book. Finally something published too late to be considered as background to Lossky, but significant. In 1949, in the journal La Vie spirituelle, there appeared an article by Louis Bouyer (Bouyer 1949), published in English as ‘“Mysticism”: An essay on the history of a word’ (Bouyer 1956).1 In this article, Bouyer traces the use of μυστικός in Greek patristic use (not ‘mysticism’, as in the uncomprehending English translation). Its origin is without question in the Greek mysteries, but Bouyer maintains that this has had no substantial influence on the Christian use of the term, simply because when Christians start to think of the mysteries, immediately it is the mystery of Christ that they are concerned with: a mystery hidden from before the ages, but manifest in the Incarnate Christ; which, even manifest, still remains hidden, because it is beyond human comprehension. The sense of the hiddenness of the mystery of Christ is the primary reference for the word μυστικός. How do we know the mystery of Christ? How is it declared? Primarily in the Scriptures: the mystery of Christ is the key to the Scriptures, the hidden meaning of both the Old and New Testaments. Overwhelmingly, the use of the word μυστικός in the Fathers refers to the hidden meaning of the Scriptures, the deeper meaning, μυστικὸς νοῦς. Closely related to that meaning, we find throughout the

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early centuries, a use that refers to what it is that is revealed by the Scriptures: the divinity of Christ, the doctrine of the Trinity, are regularly referred to as μυστικός, μυστικώτερος, for these mysterious doctrines remain hidden, because beyond human comprehension. It is these mysteries, which the Scriptures unfold, that we participate in through the sacraments, called in Greek τὰ μυστήρια: in the Eucharist, as we are united body and soul to Christ’s body, we participate in his divinity, we share in the divine life of love of the Trinity. A further meaning, derived from the first two, refers to the hidden, inner life of the baptized Christian, the life ‘hid with Christ in God’, as the Apostle Paul put it in his epistle to the Colossians (3:3). This third meaning is not, however, separate from these two primary uses: the inner meaning of the Scriptures and the Sacrament. The hidden life of the Christian is nourished by pondering on the Scriptures and by participation in the Divine Mysteries. Bouyer insists that there is here a hierarchy of meaning: first of all, μυστικός referring to the mystery of Christ ‘hidden in God from the ages’ (cf. Eph. 3:9) and now manifest in Christ; secondly, μυστικός referring to the means by which we participate in Christ – through the Scriptures and the Eucharist; and finally, the hidden, inner life of the Christian, nourished on pondering on the Scriptures and their deeper meaning, and by participation in the sacraments, is called μυστικός. Most talk of ‘mysticism’, Bouyer implies, isolates this last use, severing it from its roots, and turns the mystical into an exploration of an individual search for union with God. Bouyer’s paper can hardly have influenced Lossky, but I mention it, for I think we shall find that it represents the final point of a trajectory on which Lossky had himself embarked.

Meister Eckhart From about the end of the 1920s until the end of his life, Lossky was engaged in a major study of the German mystic, Meister Eckhart. His study is important for the history of Eckhart studies, as he is the first modern scholar to concentrate on the Latin works, the only ones about which there is little or no controversy as to their authenticity. The title, Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu, suggests links with what Lossky is perhaps most famous for: negative or apophatic theology. Lossky does indeed begin his enormous work on Eckhart by considering what meaning the ‘apophatic’ has for ‘the Dominican from Thuringia’, le dominicain thuringien, as he frequently calls him. This depends, he says, on the different ways in which God can be understood to be ineffable: beyond thought or language. The discussion invokes Augustine, Plotinus, Dionysios the Areopagite and Thomas Aquinas, and reaches a point where he compares Aquinas, many of whose metaphysical principles Eckhart shares (they were both disciples of Albert the Great), with Eckhart himself. For Thomas, God is unknowable, unnameable, because: a created intellect, whether angelic or human, can only know by its natural powers the esse determined by an essence… But the pure act of existing, ‘whose very essence is to exist’, the puritas essendi, the ipsum esse

‘Mystical theology’?  27

subsistens, not being distinct from but identical with its essence, remains indeterminable and cannot be named from what He is. That is why the name that is best fitted to designate God is Qui est [He who is]: it names, without determining, That which is its own existence… Separated from all beings whose act of existing is determined by an essence which distinguishes it, God then remains ineffable so far as his own existence is concerned. That is the reason why Saint Thomas… has transformed the ‘unnameable’ of Denys into Esse innominabile [unnameable Being]. (Lossky 1960, 25) But for Eckhart, God is Deus absconditus, the God who hides himself (Isa. 45:15), Esse absconditum, Being that hides itself: hiding itself in the inner recesses of the mind or heart, for as Augustine affirmed, addressing God in his Confessions: tu autem eras interior intimo meo et superior summo meo [you were more inward than my innermost self and higher than my highest] (Conf. III.6.11). With a movement of thought characteristic of the Western Middle Ages, Dionysios is read with Augustinian eyes, so that Eckhart ‘enters into himself to search for the Esse absconditum in the innermost depths of the soul’: ‘Is not this – Lossky asks – to try to transform into the mystical [transformer en mystique] the natural theology of Saint Thomas?’ (Lossky 1960, 30–31). Lossky concludes: When he searches for the God Esse of Saint Thomas in the abditum mentis [hidden place of the mind] of Saint Augustine, Eckhart draws on the two theologians, uniting them on a mystical level [sur le plan d’une mystique] which he is able to express in terms of a speculative theology. (Lossky 1960, 32) We are not concerned here with Eckhart, but this brief exposition shows that Lossky has a clear sense of what is meant by la mystique, the mystical. The mystical Lossky takes to be the inward, something beyond conceptualization, grasped by experience. Eckhart’s speculative theology is presented by Lossky as a kind of conceptual transcript of this inward experience, la mystique.

The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church Nevertheless, what about The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church itself? How does Lossky explain himself in the book? In his introduction he has a few pages in which he discusses ‘the mystical’: The eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between the mystical and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church… To put it another way, we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary,

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look for a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically… For the Christian, therefore, the mystical cannot exist without theology, but, above all, there is no theology without the mystical… The mystical is accordingly treated in the present work as the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence. (Lossky 1957, 8–9, 2005, 6–7)2 The mystical and theology relate as experience and theory, but experience of what? Ultimately of God, but that is not where Lossky begins: he begins by speaking of ‘personal experience of the divine mysteries’, the term ‘mysteries’ being – not exactly ambiguous, but with at least two connotations – meaning both the sacraments of the Church and also mysterious truths about the Godhead. That double meaning is no chance homonymity; the two meanings seem to me to be closely related for Lossky, and for the Orthodox Church, because the mysterious truths about God – his existence as a Trinity of love, his creation of the world, his care for the world and his redemption of it, pre-eminently in the Incarnation – are truths that are experienced and celebrated in the Divine Mysteries, or the Sacraments, of the Church. The sacramental aspect remains largely implicit in Lossky’s book, and we can see why, I think, from the understanding of the mystical we find in his treatise on Eckhart: for there the mystical is a matter of union with God in the depths of the soul. It is an experience, not necessarily experiences of a strange and unusual kind, but an experience involving, as he puts it in the quotation just given, ‘a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit’. It is, too, an experience that is apophatic, ineffable, in ways that we have yet to explore. Lossky goes on to show how this experience lies at the heart of the dogmas expounded and defended by the Church: [t]he main preoccupation, the issue at stake, in the questions which successively arise respecting the Holy Spirit, grace and the Church herself, … is always the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God. All the history of Christian dogma unfolds itself about this mystical centre, guarded by different weapons against its many and diverse assailants in the course of successive ages. (Lossky 1957, 10) This relates the mystical to the emergence of dogmas in the history of the Church: dogmas are concerned to safeguard ‘the possibility, the manner, or the means of our union with God’. Later on, Lossky will say that [i]n the Church and through the sacraments our nature enters into union with the divine nature in the hypostasis of the Son, the Head of the mystical body. Our humanity becomes consubstantial with the deified humanity, united with the Person of Christ. (Lossky 1957, 181)

‘Mystical theology’?  29

The mysteries, in both senses of the term, are concerned with an experienced union with God in Christ, mediated by the sacraments, or mysteries, and felt in the heart. Note, however, that this experienced union is founded on ‘[o]ur humanity becom[ing] consubstantial with the deified humanity… of Christ’: it is not experience that gives a conviction of reality, but experience of a – dogmatically defined – union, in this case expressed by the assertion found in the Chalcedonian Definition that Christ is ὁμοούσιος ἡμῖν, consubstantial with us, just as he is ὁμοούσιος τῷ πατρί, consubstantial with the Father. It is this that gives Lossky’s presentation such a different orientation from what is too frequently associated with mysticism in the West: it is not detached from dogma, but founded on the dogmatic truths of the Christian tradition; it is not indifferent to Church organization, hierarchy and ­sacraments, but rooted in the structured life of the Church; it is not  ­individualistic, but  grows out of the experience of the eucharistic community.

The divine darkness The mystical, for Lossky, is bound up with the apophatic. The second chapter of his Mystical Theology is entitled ‘The Divine Darkness’: the darkness Moses entered as he ascended Mount Sinai to receive God’s revelation – a darkness, the meaning of which was explored by the Fathers of the Church: Clement of Alexandria, the two Cappadocian Gregories, and epitomized by Dionysios the Areopagite in his short treatise, The Mystical Theology. In the darkness, we can no longer see: what is revealed is beyond conceptual understanding, but it can be felt, it is a presence. Lossky introduces Dionysios’ distinction between kataphatic and apophatic theology: the theology of affirmation and the theology of denial. He is insistent (both in The Mystical Theology and in his book on Eckhart) that these theologies are not to be understood as equal (as he argues they are understood in the West), as if affirmative theology is simply to be corrected by negative theology – a kind of tacking, as in sailing, to keep one’s thought about God on course – rather apophatic theology is more fundamental: it does not so much correct affirmative theology, as actually undergird it, for the deepest truth is that God is ineffable, beyond name and concept. Lossky comments: Indeed, not only does he [the theologian, the one who seeks God] go forth from his own self… but he belongs wholly to the Unknowable, being deified in this union with the uncreated. Here union means deification. At the same time, while intimately united with God he knows Him only as Unknowable, in other words as infinitely set apart by His nature, remaining even in union, inaccessible in that which He is in His essential being. (Lossky 1957, 38)

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Lossky raises the question as to whether in speaking of union thus we are envisaging an ecstatic experience and responds: Apophaticism is not necessarily a theology of ecstasy. It is, above all, an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God. Such an attitude utterly excludes all abstract and purely intellectual theology which would adapt the mysteries of the wisdom of God to human ways of thought. It is an existential attitude which involves the whole man: there is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man. To know God one must draw near to Him. No one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian… Apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion: the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth. In this sense all true theology is fundamentally apophatic. (Lossky 1957, 38–39) This apophatic approach has manifold implications for the pursuit of theology. Any apophatic theology is tentative; as Lossky put it in a famous essay, ‘Tradition and Traditions’: [a]ny theological doctrine which pretends to be a perfect explanation of the revealed mystery will inevitably appear to be false: by the very fact of pretending to the fulness of knowledge it will set itself in opposition to the fulness in which the Truth is known in part. (Lossky 1974, 161–162) This does not at all mean that Lossky sits light to dogma: dogmas are important, but not as the building blocks of some comprehensive account of the divine mysteries, but rather as a series of decisions, arrived at by the Church, that are there to prevent ways of thinking that might obscure or bypass the mystery of God before whom we stand in awe. One might say that it is impossible to understand God and his ways; nevertheless it is very easy to misunderstand God and his ways, and the dogmas are there to help prevent such misunderstanding. As Olivier Clément put it, summarizing the lectures he heard Lossky give in the 1950s: The whole purpose of the Church, in defining [dogma], is to preserve the possibility, for each Christian, of participating with all his being in the whole of revelation, that is to say, of sharing in the very life of Him who reveals himself. That is why, said Vladimir Lossky, Orthodoxy refuses to multiply dogmatic definitions. The definition, when it can no longer be avoided, is there to correspond to a precise, practical necessity, is there as evidence to bar the route to erroneous interpretations. (Clément 1985, 25) In interpreting and exploring the meaning of dogma this sense of reserve remains. Lossky cites a remark of St Ignatios of Antioch: ‘He who possesses the

‘Mystical theology’?  31

word of Jesus can even hear his silence’ (Ad Ephes. 15. 2). Lossky comments: ‘The words of Revelation have then a margin of silence which cannot be picked up by the ears of those who are outside’ (Lossky 1974, 150–151). There is a margin of silence that surrounds any manifestation of mystery (see Williams 2008). One is reminded of a remark of Mallarmé’s: ‘Toute chose sacrée et qui veut demeurer sacrée s’enveloppe de mystère’ (‘Everything sacred, that wishes to remain sacred, clothes itself in mystery’: Mallarmé 1945, 257). If we are to understand what is revealed, we need to be attuned to the margin of silence that surrounds it. That margin of silence is only discerned in prayer. The kind of dogmatic attitude, if we can call it that, which is necessary if we are to engage with the mysteries of the Church, the mystery of God, is, in many ways, a quite ‘undogmatic’ attitude, using the word in its commonly accepted sense. It reminds me very much of what the English poet Keats called ‘negative capability’: ‘that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’ (Keats 1935, 72).

Lossky’s mystical theology What, then, did Vladimir Lossky mean by ‘mystical theology’? I have suggested that, though he may start from an understanding of the mystical as bound up with some kind of inward, personal experience, as he develops his ideas – mostly, I would suggest, because of his constant recourse to the Fathers – this experience becomes identical with participating in the sacramental life of the Church. This does not exclude ecstatic experience, but it is more to do with our minds and hearts being conformed to God and his revelation of love through the Son and the Spirit. There is experience, there is inner transformation, but the experience is an experience of a reality independent of us, and reality we seek to be assimilated to: the reality of the love of God, that binds the Trinity in Unity, is the motive for the creation of the world out of nothing, and is manifest in the self-emptying of the Son in the Incarnation. The transformation that is to take place in us as we respond to the love of God in Christ is first and foremost grounded in repentance. Towards the end of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, Lossky repeated this insight in memorable words, with which I will conclude: We have had again and again, in the course of our study of the mystical theology of the Eastern Church, to refer to the apophatic attitude which is characteristic of its religious thought. As we have seen, the negations which draw attention to the divine incomprehensibility are not prohibitions upon knowledge: apophaticism, so far from being a limitation, enables us to transcend all concepts, every sphere of philosophical speculation. It is a tendency towards an ever-greater plenitude, in which knowledge is transformed into ignorance, the theology of concepts into contemplation, dogmas into experience of ineffable

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mysteries. It is, moreover, an existential theology involving man’s entire being, which sets him upon the way of union, which obliges him to be changed, to transform his nature that he may attain the true gnosis which is the contemplation of the Holy Trinity. Now, this ‘change of heart’, this μετάνοια, means repentance. The apophatic way of Eastern theology is the repentance of the human person before the face of the living God. (Lossky 1957, 238–239)

Notes 1 This article and others were eventually expanded into a book (Bouyer 1986), the first part of his final trilogy in which he explored an encounter with Eastern and Orthodox themes, to be completed in Bouyer (1988, 1994). 2 I have modified the translation since ‘[la] mystique’ in the original French is rendered in English as ‘mysticism’, which, as we have seen, is not perhaps quite the same thing.

Bibliography Baruzi, Jean. (1931) Saint Jean de la Croix et le problème de l’expérience mystique. Paris: Librairie Félix Alcain, second, revised and augmented edition. Bouyer, Louis. (1949) ‘Mystique’. Essai sur l’histoire d’un mot. Supplément de la Vie spirituelle, 9, 3–23. Bouyer, Louis. (1956) ‘“Mysticism”: An essay on the history of a word’, in Mystery and Mysticism. London: Blackfriars Publications, 119–137. Bouyer, Louis. (1986) Mysterion: du mystère à la mystique. Paris: O.E.I.L. Bouyer, Louis. (1988) Gnôsis: la connaissance de Dieu dans l’Écriture. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Bouyer, Louis. (1994) Sophia ou le Monde en Dieu. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Bremond, Henri. (1916–1933) Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, vols. 11. Paris: Librairie Bloud et Gay. Clément, Olivier. (1985) Orient–Occident. Deux passeurs: Vladimir Lossky and Paul Evdokimov. Geneva, Labor et Fides, 17–103. Daniélou, Jean. (1944) Platonisme et théologie mystique. Paris: Aubier Éditions Montaigne (new revised edition, 1954). Gilson, Étienne. (1947) La Théologie mystique de saint Bernard. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. Heiler, Friedrich. (1919) Das Gebet. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt; abridged ET, Prayer, 1932. Heiler, Friedrich. (1937) Urkirche und Ostkirche [Early Church and Eastern Church]. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt. Heiler, Friedrich. (1971) Die Ostkirchen [The Eastern Churches]. Munich: Ernst Reinhardt. Keats, John. (1935) The Letters of John Keats, ed. M.B. Forman, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Louth, Andrew. (2015) Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK.

‘Mystical theology’?  33 Lossky, Vladimir. (1957) The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. ET, London: James Clarke. Lossky, Vladimir. (1960) Théologie négative et connaissance de Dieu chez Maître Eckhart. Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin. Lossky, Vladimir. (1974) In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. ET of À l’image et à la resemblance de Dieu. Paris: Aubier– Montaigne, 1967 (now reprinted with original pagination and foreword, bibliography and index by Saulias Rumšas OP, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2010). Lossky, Vladimir. (2005) Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient, reprint with the pagination of the original 1944 edition (Paris: Aubier, Édition Montaigne) with a preface by Saulias Rumšas. OP, Paris: Éditions du Cerf. Mallarmé, Stéphane. (1945) Oeuvres completes, ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry. Paris: Gallimard. Otto, Rudolf. (1917) Das Heilige; in English: The Idea of the Holy. 1923. Otto, Rudolf (1926) West-Östliche Mystik; in English: Mysticism: East and West. 1932. Poulain, Augustine-François. (1921) Des Grâces d’oraison, 11th edn. Paris: Beauchesne, 1931. Saudreau, Auguste. (1921) La vie d’union à Dieu, 3rd edn. Paris. Stavrou, Michel. (2014) ‘La démarche néopatristique de Myrrha Lot-Borodine et Vladimir Lossky’, in Les Pères de l’Église aux sources de l’Europe, ed. Dominique Gonnet and Michel Stavrou. Paris: Éditions de Cerf, 200–225. Stolz, Anselm. (1947) Théologie de la Mystique, 2nd edn. Chevetogne: Éditions des Bénédictines d’Amay Underhill, Evelyn. (1911) Mysticism, 13th edn. London: Methuen. Underhill, Evelyn. (1936) Worship. London: Nisbet. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. (1941) Kosmische Liturgie. Maximus der Bekenner. Höhe und Krise des griechischen Weltbilds. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder (entirely revised edition: Kosmische Liturgie: Das Weltbild Maximus’ des Bekenners, Einsiedeln: Johannes-­ Verlag, 1961, of which there is an ET by Brian Daley, San Francisco, CA: Igantius Press, 2003 [which, however, omits most of part II: Texte und Studien]). von Balthasar, Hans Urs. (1942) Présence et pensée: essai sur la philosophie religieuse de Grégoire de Nysse. Paris: Beauchesne. von Hügel, Baron Friedrich. (1911) The Mystical Element of Religion as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her friends. London: J.M. Dent and Sons. Williams, Rowan. (2007) ‘Lossky, the via negativa and the foundations of theology’, in Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton, London: SCM Press, 1–24; reprinted from New Studies in Theology 1 (the only volume to appear), ed. Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes. London: Duckworth, 1979, 95–117. Williams, Rowan. (2008) A Margin of Silence: The Holy Spirit in Russian Orthodox Theology/Une marge de silence: l’Esprit Saint dans la théologie orthodoxe russe. Québec, Canada: Éditions du Lys Vert. Zordan, Davide. (2008) Connaissance et mystère: l’itinéraire théologique de Louis Bouyer. Paris: Éditions du Cerf.

3 The mystical theology of Margery Kempe Writing the inner life Corinne Saunders

Abstract The Book of Margery Kempe, often described as the first autobiographical work in English, offers a remarkable and nuanced account of medieval visionary experience. Yet recent criticism has taken a largely historicist approach, moving away from exploration of Margery’s inner life. Drawing on the insights of the Wellcome Trust-funded interdisciplinary research project ‘Hearing the Voice’, this essay returns to Margery’s mystical theology and its role in her writing of the inner life. Margery’s inner voices and visionary experience more generally are placed in the context of her active domestic and religious life, and of other medieval religious writing, to illuminate the complex, intertextual yet individual quality of her narrative.

Introduction Six hundred years ago, Margery Kempe made the journey from King’s Lynn to Norwich, to visit the celebrated anchorite Dame Julian: the sole manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe marks the visit in red in the margin. Margery seeks Julian’s advice on the ‘very many holy speeches and converse that our Lord spoke to her soul’ and her ‘many wonderful revelations’, to discover whether there is ‘any deception’ in them (77).1 Julian’s renown for good counsel is rooted in her own visionary experience, recorded in her Revelations of Divine Love.2 Such revelations, she responds, may reflect ‘not the influence of a good spirit, but rather of an evil spirit’ (78): they must be judged by whether they move the soul to love, chastity and compassion. The moving of the soul through vision, voice-hearing and embodied experience is the subject of Margery’s remarkable narrative. Though Margery is frequently paired with Julian, in many ways she could not have been more different: the wife of a Norfolk merchant, she bore fourteen children, ran a brewing business, went on pilgrimages that took her as far as Rome and Jerusalem, was tried for heresy, and debated with the highest clerics in the land. She was also, however, a visionary who adopted a strongly religious ascetic life, and engaged deeply with the established tradition of

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female spiritual revelation. In part, The Book of Margery Kempe, written down for her by an amanuensis, recounts Margery’s attempt to render her bourgeois life in King’s Lynn compatible with those of the mystics, saints and holy women who were her inspiration: their writings illuminate Margery’s career, but they also point to her uniqueness. Her book – and her conversations with the Lord – are the testament of a woman searching for a societal and spiritual voice, and her life interweaves withdrawal from and participation in the world.

Anchorite, hysteric, dissenter Whereas the women whose lives influenced her so strongly were wealthy and aristocratic, Margery’s background was very different: her father, John Brunham, was a prosperous burgess in the port city of King’s Lynn in Norfolk, who held various civic positions, including those of Mayor, alderman, member of parliament, justice and coroner.3 Margery relates how she used to chastise her husband, the merchant John Kempe, to whom she was married at the age of twenty (c.1393), for being of lower birth than she was. Though she mentions fourteen pregnancies, it is not known how many children survived. At the age of about forty (1413), she persuaded John Kempe to agree to a chaste marriage, and during the following five years undertook a series of remarkable journeys: pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Santiago de Compostela and Italy, and travels within England which included trials in York and Leicester. She then experienced a long period of ill health, and also nursed her husband in his old age; following his death (c.1431) she made another journey, this time to Prussia, after which her book was undertaken. The narrative records many encounters with clerics, including the Archbishops of York and Canterbury, the Bishop of Lincoln and the Abbot of Leicester, connections with priests and monastic houses, meetings with other holy men and women, and friendships with lay women. Though some viewed Margery with suspicion and downright hostility, many also held her in esteem and affection. Yet while her public life was so remarkable, her book is most of all a document of spiritual life. The history and reception of the Book are revealing. The sole manuscript was copied in the mid-fifteenth century and held by the Carthusian priory of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire. Annotations indicate the responses of four fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers: they include notes, additions and emendations, and references to other contemplatives such as Richard Rolle and the sixteenth-century Carthusians Richard Methley and John Norton, all of whom described the physical manifestation of mystical experience.4 Annotations signal devout emotional responses, including through marginal decorations such as hearts and flames, ‘the conventional symbols associated with [Richard] Rolle’s intense and fervent spiritual love and vision’ (Kempe 2001, p. xi). The book was acquired by the ancient Catholic Butler-Bowdon family, perhaps entrusted to them by the Carthusians during the dissolution of

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the monasteries, and was not rediscovered until 1934. Margery’s name, however, was known through Wynkyn de Worde’s printing (c.1501) of a seven-­ page pamphlet of extracts drawn from the devoutest sections of the book, reprinted in 1521 by Henry Pepwell as one of seven mystical treatises in The Cell of Self-Knowledge, alongside works by the twelfth-century Augustinian Richard of St Victor, Catherine of Siena and Walter Hilton, and Dionysian treatises associated with The Cloud of Unknowing.5 The rediscovery of the book in the 1930s, writes Windeatt, ‘coincided with a renewed interest in mystical writing in general and in the medieval English mystics in particular’, an interest which took up the work of W.R. (Dean) Inge, William James, Friedrich von Hügel and Evelyn Underhill, who also edited The Cloud of Unknowing and Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (Kempe 2004a, p. 1). Margery’s book, however, did not entirely fit expectations of the ‘devout ancress’ which Pepwell had styled her as, or the company kept by the extract in The Cell of Self-Knowledge.6 The medieval scholar Hope Emily Allen, who first identified the manuscript and with Sanford Brown Meech prepared the first edition, notes the contrast with previous perceptions of Margery’s writing, commenting on the juxtaposition of the spiritual with the ‘fanatical’ and on the ‘neurotic strain’ (Allen 1934, p. 15). For Allen, the special value of the book was socio-historical: Margery’s descriptions of pilgrim-routes and vivid characterisations of individuals. Allen also, however, describes Margery as a ‘mystic’, offering a highly positive verdict: ‘she emerges from her story as a woman of great character and force. For very different achievements, she may be placed alongside her contemporaries who were also mystics: St. Bridget of Sweden, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Joan of Arc.’ (1934, p. 15). In the first edition of the Book and in responses to it, however, the qualities of madness, neurosis and hysteria were highlighted.7 Twentieth-century feminist scholarship occasioned a shift in perceptions of Margery, from hysteric to proto-feminist: a woman bold enough to speak in a patriarchal world, who refused to ‘go and spin, and card wool, as other women do’ (168), and chose instead to follow the example of holy women such as St Bridget of Sweden or Mary of Oignies. More recently, Margery’s radical Christianity has been emphasised, her ‘attempts to live out the Christ-like life in a world where goods count more than good’ (Kempe 2001, p. xiii). Margery has moved from mystic to dissenter. Most extreme is Staley’s hypothesis that Margery invented an amanuensis whose words framed and distanced the book in order more safely to critique religious and social practices and injustices (1994). Current scholarship is almost exclusively historicist: thus the Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe (Arnold and Lewis 2004) does not engage with mysticism, and scarcely with affective piety. The interests of its contributors are most of all in the Book’s engagement with the socio-cultural and political currents of its time.8 The qualities that troubled Margery’s early readers are set aside, and even her compulsive ‘cryings’ are turned into the performance of piety, with Margery ‘picking from a menu of practices’ (Salih 2004, p. 176).

The mystical theology of Margery Kempe  37

Mysticism, contemplation and affective piety Can reviving the context of mysticism offer a fresh perspective on the Book of Margery Kempe? An approach foregrounding mystical theology, with its emphasis on individual spiritual life, coincides with new interest in Margery’s inner voices. The interdisciplinary ‘Hearing the Voice’ project (based at Durham University and funded by the Wellcome Trust), which explores the phenomenon of hearing voices without external stimuli, has drawn attention to Margery Kempe’s visionary experiences, in terms of the relevance of this early narrative account for voice-hearers in the present, and the correspondences as well as differences between past and present.9 In his mildly dissenting introduction to the Companion to Margery Kempe, Barry Windeatt chooses to emphasise the issue of voice: ‘It is time to read Margery Kempe’s inner voices as a projection of her own spiritual understanding of divine interaction with her, and hence as an insight into her own mentality’ (2004, p. 15). Uneven in content and tone, ‘the Book’s record of her inward life’, argues Windeatt, ‘might have been read as the soul’s report of what it had understood itself to hear, mediated through the soul’s own capacity to apprehend the answer to its question’. We hear in her conversations with the Lord her ‘inward debate with her own understanding of the divine demands upon her’. Windeatt notes the irony that the very outer life that is presented so blurrily across the book as, if anything, ‘a distraction’, has come to be the interest of contemporary readers, who have largely ignored the inner life of the spirit and failed to listen to Margery’s inner voices (2004, p. 16). It might be argued that the term ‘mystic’ is simply not appropriate to Margery. She was far from adopting the via negativa of Dionysian tradition, which argued for the rejection of affective experience and finally, of reason itself, in order to open the soul fully to the divine. Such a method is presented in the Middle English The Cloud of Unknowing, which takes up the Dionysian image of the darkness of ignorance, which the soul must enter to approach God; St John of the Cross in his treatise Dark Night of the Soul comparably describes the ‘Night of Sense’ and the ‘Night of the Spirit’ (1934–1935, pp. 347–386). Margery, by contrast, embraces the senses: her spiritual experience is shaped by the affective and deeply embodied. Yet the view of the religious historian Clarissa Atkinson remains persuasive, that if we adopt the open definition of mysticism as ‘immediate knowledge of Ultimate Reality (whether or not this is called “God”) by direct personal experience’, then the context is a fitting one (Cross and Livingstone 1997, p. 1127; Atkinson 1983, p. 40).10 Margery’s book, Atkinson argues, enacts ‘mystical theology’ in that it conveys powerfully and directly ‘an experiential knowledge of God’ (Cross and Livingstone 1997, p. 1128). Mysticism, she contends, ‘is primarily a state of prayer’: Margery enters into – rather than thinking about – Christ’s life and Passion, conversing directly with Jesus, the Virgin and the saints: the emotions evoked by meditation ‘helped her to participate in divine experience through the humanity she shared with Christ’ (1983, pp. 1, 41).

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Atkinson argues persuasively that Margery’s spiritual journey fits the stages characteristic of mystical schemes: commencing with an experience of ‘conversion’, ‘the awakening of the transcendental consciousness’ identified by Evelyn Underhill (1914, p. 176), to move through ‘purgation, illumination and union’, though, as Atkinson notes, these ‘do not describe the totality of her experience’ (1983, pp. 41, 48). Margery belongs with a group of late medieval devotional writers, including Richard Rolle (d. 1349), Walter Hilton (d. 1396), Julian of Norwich (d. post 1416), Nicholas Love (d. 1424), and the author of The Cloud of Unknowing (late fourteenth century) – writers who both compose and translate, using English ‘with a new level of intensity and complexity’ to illuminate their mystical theology (Windeatt 1994, p. 1). Through active practice, their readers too might approach the mysteries of divine love. The many references to religious works in Margery’s Book reflect her deep engagement with such vernacular devotional writings, and their formative role in her narrative. She offers a detailed description of the course of readings she undertakes with a priest of Lynn (182). Alongside the Bible, especially influential were the works of Rolle and Hilton. Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection (probably ‘Hilton’s book’, 182), written some time after 1380, offers a guide to the soul’s progression through the life of prayer from purgation to illumination and union with God. Hilton gives an acute and sympathetic account of the degrees of the contemplative life: knowledge of God through reason, emotion, and finally, ‘both in cognition and in affection’. He is sensitive to the challenges posed by the difficult journey of renewal, the power of ‘feeling’, and the need for humility, charity and self-knowledge to counter the ‘darkness’ of sin – though his advocacy of moderation does not always seem to have governed Margery’s choices.11 The English mystics are on the whole suspicious of physical manifestations of visionary experience, but the hermit Richard Rolle in particular offers Margery a model of ardent, embodied desire. Rolle’s Incendium Amoris (The Fire of Love, 1343) treats many of the same themes as Hilton, but with a much more personal, experiential emphasis – from the moment of its opening, when he feels the warmth of the flame of love, and touches his breast to see whether his heart is literally on fire: ‘it set my soul aglow as if a real fire were burning there’.12 The book is in part a rhapsody on that fire of love, its joys often presented in terms of music, song and sweetness; in part a charismatic guide to spiritual progress. Rolle’s fervent extremes and his deeply sensual descriptions of the glorious joys of love resonate strikingly with Margery’s account of spiritual experience. Closely related in subject matter and explicitly mentioned by Margery is the Stimulis Amoris (The Prick of Love, misattributed to Bonaventure in the Middle Ages and perhaps translated and adapted by Hilton in the late fourteenth century), a popular composite work comprising a series of meditations on the Passion, a treatise on the contemplative life by the thirteenth-century Franciscan James of Milan, and a set of meditations on prayers. This work too is characterised by its sensual descriptions of divine love, its urging of the reader to ‘fervent desire’ and its profoundly affective emphasis on the power of meditation to

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move the individual to the ‘sweetness of love’, so extreme in its ravishment of the soul that it is a kind of ‘drunkenness’. The true lover must share in Christ’s Passion: Ah the wounds of Jesus Christ that are so full of love, and that may I well say, for on a time as I entered in them with mine eyes opened, me thought that mine eyes were filled of his blood, and so I went in entering till I came to the innerest of his heart.13 Margery recalls how a priest reads to her of the gift of holy tears from The Prick of Love, along with passages from The Fire of Love and the lives of Mary of Oignies and Elizabeth of Hungary (ch. 62). She may also have known the early fourteenth-century Meditationes Vitae Christi (Meditations on the Life of Christ), written for a Franciscan nun and similarly attributed to Bonaventure, which were widely circulated and translated into English early in the fifteenth century by the Carthusian Nicholas Love as The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, with the addition of numerous refutations of Wycliffite doctrines. The model of these books, and the tradition of contemplation more generally, suggests Windeatt, perhaps most of all shaped Margery’s spiritual life, ‘her imagination and revelations… influenced by that meditative tradition of projecting oneself into, and empathising with, the scenes of Christ’s life’ (Kempe 2004a, p. 11). Like that of her contemporaries, Margery’s devotional practice reflects the influential role played by affective piety in religious practice and in both secular and sacred writing; it takes to new extremes late medieval interest in the individual relationship with Christ.14 Margery’s theology can be seen as mystical in that her book recounts her experiences of mystical phenomena across her life, experiences of a more or less paranormal kind in which she directly and personally gains immediate knowledge of God. Margery was not, however, a theologian, and would not have thought of herself as a mystic, any more than Walter Hilton, Richard Rolle or Julian of Norwich would: rather, she narrates the kind of experience that is retrospectively seen as mystical. Unlike Hilton or Rolle, however, she does not offer extensive analysis of the path to God, and unlike Julian, she does not interpret her experiences in sophisticated theological terms. Her analysis is conventional and often brief, and her theology is conservative. Leading a radical holy life, however, inevitably caused many to align Margery with the heresies of the Lollards, the followers of John Wycliffe. Wycliffe had argued powerfully for Church reform, on the grounds that true authority derived from the ideal, celestial Church, and hence that clerical authority was subject to grace, and could be withdrawn by civil power. His radical Eucharistic doctrine held transubstantiation to be superstition. The Lollards took up and developed these sceptical views, emphasising personal faith, divine election and the Bible, and espousing proto-­Protestant views, disseminated through preaching and books, which questioned traditional doctrines of the apostolic role of priests, clerical celibacy, transubstantiation,

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and the sacraments, as well as the practices of endowment, indulgence and pilgrimage. Extreme Lollard views included the beliefs that loving consent comprised marriage and that women should be held ‘in common’ (Kempe 2004a, 4871n). The burnings of William of Sawtre (1401) and John Badby (1410) provide chilling examples of the dangers of radical Christianity in the period. Margery’s choice to lead a life of practical devotion, to engage directly with ‘the politics of sanctity’, rather than withdraw from the world, is central to her understanding of holiness, but her public behaviour also attracts suspicion, especially her white clothes, her criticisms of swearing, which recall Lollard condemnations of oaths, her moral challenges to clerics, and her spiritual teaching and frequent references to the Bible.15 The men of Beverley, who accuse her of heresy, warn her to return to female pursuits (168); the friar who accompanies her complains that it is not fitting for him to escort a woman (171). Although she is repeatedly accused of Lollardy, and is twice tried as a heretic, on each occasion her responses prove her to be far from radical in her beliefs. She distances herself clearly from Lollard practices of illicit preaching, including by women (prohibited by St Paul) (164). Her practices are deeply orthodox: her profound piety in relation to the Eucharist, repeatedly associated with visionary experience, her devotion to Mary and the saints, her fasting, her eagerness to make confession, her many pilgrimages, and her beliefs in relation to the sacraments and indulgences (Kempe 2004a, 901n). When vernacular devotional prose had been advocated by Wycliffe and was viewed as characteristic of the Lollards, however, simply undertaking her book, like her choice to lead a public life in a patriarchal world, was not without risks.

Lives of holy women For women, unlikely to be schooled in Latin, scholastic thought or doctrine, affective piety had a special appeal in its dependence not on learning so much as emotion, contemplation and faith. Formative in providing a model for female spiritual life were the Beguine communities established on the Continent, particularly in the Low Countries and Germany, of women who came together informally, sometimes affiliated to a local religious house, to pursue a spiritual life of poverty and charity.16 Their example was familiar in England, as were the lives of celebrated holy women such as Catherine of Siena, Mary of Oignies, Elizabeth of Hungary and Bridget of Sweden. The growing tradition of female piety in the late Middle Ages, authorised by the church, offered women a new voice, which stood in opposition to traditional stereotypes of women as daughters of Eve, subject to and provoking sin and temptation. The ascetic life was a means to transform the bodiliness seen as defining women, by turning the wayward flesh to the service of God. The life of chastity, purgation, fasting and welcoming illness could offer transcendence and empowerment. Spiritual marriage rewrote earthly marriage, creating an intimate, mystical relationship

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between the soul and Christ. The special separateness of the holy woman could open her, like Mary, to hearing the voice of God or to visionary experience. Accounts of the spiritual experience and lives of holy women presented crucial paradigms for Margery, in particular that of St Bridget of Sweden (1303–1373). Bridget, a Swedish noblewoman distinguished by her holiness from childhood, was married at thirteen, bore eight children, but persuaded her husband to chastity for two years and made a pilgrimage with him to Santiago. Following his death, she adopted an active and politically engaged religious life marked by asceticism, learning and visionary experience, founding the Bridgettine order devoted to the Virgin, and eventually moving to Rome, where she engaged herself in papal politics and from where she travelled to Jerusalem. Numerous miracles and works of charity were associated with her, and she was canonised in 1391. Her 700 revelations are recorded in the Liber Celestis, dictated in Swedish and translated into Latin by Bridget’s advisors, widely circulated and further translated, including into English. Her cult was particularly promoted by the influential Bridgettine house of Syon Abbey founded by Henry V, which Margery visited, as well as visiting people and places connected with Bridget in Rome. Despite Bridget’s elevated status, learning and political influence, there are many resonances with Margery’s narrative, including Bridget’s emphasis on holy tears, her spiritual marriage to Christ, and her visions of Biblical events in which she enters vividly into the experience of the life of Christ.17 A similarly powerful influence was the life of Mary of Oignies (c.1170–1213), who was also drawn from early on to holiness, entered into a chaste marriage, adopted a life of poverty and charity with her husband, serving in a leper colony, and fulfilled a role as spiritual mother, eventually retreating to a Beguine community in Liège. Written in Latin by Jacques de Vitry (c.1160–1240) partly as a defence of the Beguines, Mary’s life was popular on the Continent, probably, like many other works, travelling to England through trade connections with the Low Countries and translated into English in the early fifteenth century. The unique Middle English manuscript places her life alongside those of Elizabeth of Spalbeek and Christina Mirabilis, translated around the same time and perhaps also known by Margery.18 The emphasis of the life of Mary of Oignies is more traditionally hagiographical than Bridget’s revelations: Jacques de Vitry, depicting himself as Mary’s spiritual friend, emphasises the pain and mortification that she undergoes in imitation of Christ, and places her life of poverty, miracles and visions in the context of Biblical examples; the work was eventually presented to the Pope. Like Margery, Mary may not herself have been literate. Her extreme tears, physical sufferings, visions, raptures and prophetic gifts all chime closely with Margery’s experience. There are striking analogies too with the Revelations of St Elizabeth of Hungary, now attributed to the Dominican nun Elizabeth of Töss, daughter of King Andreas III of Hungary and great-niece of the saint. The focus of the Revelations is on Elizabeth’s dialogues with the Virgin, who is ‘not

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only mother, lady, and teacher, but the model mystic’, her experience of conception analogous with that of ‘mystical ecstasy’: she is ‘ravished’, so filled with God’s grace that she ‘never felt so much sweetness and comfort in [her] soul’ (Elizabeth of Hungary 1996, pp. 9, 81, my translation). Like Margery’s, Elizabeth’s devotion is marked throughout by her compulsive weeping. Margery may also have been familiar with the celebrated Dialogue of St Catherine of Siena (1378), translated into Middle English in the early fifteenth century as The Orcherd of Syon: the work is presented by its translator as a ‘fruitful’ and ‘spiritual [ghostli] orchard’ for the nuns of Syon Abbey (Hodgson and Liegey, 1966, p. 1, my translation). The dialogue between the soul and the Lord, and central passage celebrating tears as reflecting the stages of the soul, along with the extreme visionary experiences, spiritual marriage, mortifications and prophetic voice of Catherine, could not but have appealed to Margery. On her travels Margery may also have heard of women mystics such as Blessed Angela of Foligno, a married woman whose conversion experience was followed by compulsive weeping and shrieking and dramatic mystical visions, and St Dorothea of Montau (Prussia), also married, a mother and the recipient of visionary experiences, her devotion manifest in copious tears, who eventually took a vow of chastity and after her husband’s death became an anchorite. Margery may have known too of the Flemish Beguine Marguerite Porete, whose treatise Le Mirouer des Simples Ames (The Mirror of Simple Souls), a mystical dialogue between Lady Love, Lady Reason and the Free Soul, was viewed as heretical and connected with dangerous doctrines of the ‘Free Spirit’, which rejected the teachings of the Church. Porete was burnt as a heretic in France in 1310 – though the book was translated into English, probably by a Carthusian in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, who did not connect the work either with heresy or with a female author. The lives and works of other holy women support, shape and inspire Margery’s spiritual and imaginative experience; they also offer literary authorities, models of a genre to which her Book, however imperfectly, aims to conform. In this sense Margery’s unique Book is a conversation, a polyphony of voices, including those of other women visionaries. It is also aspirational: most of Margery’s models were aristocratic, many were highly learned, with notable political and religious influence, and a number were canonised. Although the tone of Margery’s Book is so individual, its process of creation, and its relation to the events it narrates, are uncertain. According to the Proem, clerics who believed Margery to be inspired urged her to ‘have a book written of her feelings and her revelations’ (35); but she did not receive the divine command to do so until twenty years after her first visionary experience.19 Unlettered, she employed an Englishman (perhaps her son) living in Germany to write her life, and later brought the book to a priest who found it impossible to read, written in ‘neither good English nor German’ (35). After four years (and an unsuccessful attempt by another scribe), the priest is inspired to return to the manuscript, which he deciphers with Margery and

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uses as the basis for his rewriting, which he dates to 1436 (37); he also adds a short second book detailing Margery’s life since completion of the first. Despite its immediacy of voice, then, the book is at several removes both from its creator and its subject matter, written many years after the events it describes and probably with two intermediaries. Though the narrative creates a sense of remarkably vivid recollection, late on Margery also draws attention to what is lost of her experience: ‘within a short time afterwards she had forgotten the most part of it’ (243). There is an inevitable sense of fiction in the reconstruction of what only the soul can truly remember. Though it is frequently identified as the first autobiography in English, this generic label does not accurately convey the book’s literary and fictive qualities; a more fitting term might be ‘life-writing’.20 Recent scholarship has suggested that Margery may have been more learned than her narrative suggests.21 As Mary Carruthers has argued, in this period of widespread illiteracy, individuals had extraordinarily developed powers of memory: it was not uncommon to be able to read but not write, and perhaps even to comprehend Latin without being literate (Carruthers 1990). While Staley’s radical argument, that Margery invented a fictional scribe, is not persuasive, we receive a powerful sense of Margery’s wit, wisdom and ‘shaping imagination’ (Kempe 2001, p. x). The book may be best seen as the product of a negotiation between Margery and her amanuensis. Scribal intervention is probably most evident in the ordering of the book, but may also be reflected in the selection of events and their interpretation, and in the repeated references to other works which place the book within a tradition of mystical contemplation and lives of holy women.

Conversion and revelation The book opens dramatically, with the narrative of Margery’s terrifying madness following the birth of her first child. Feeling deep guilt for an unconfessed sin, sharply reproved by her confessor, and fearing eternal damnation, she goes ‘out of her mind’, to be ‘amazingly disturbed and tormented with spirits’, seeing devils with flaming mouths pawing at and threatening her (41). She must be forcibly restrained from suicide. It is in this desperate mental state, perhaps what would now be diagnosed as postpartum psychosis, that she experiences her first vision. As in other mystical writing, illness represents a transitional state between life and death when the soul is open to vision. Thus Julian of Norwich prays to be brought near death, and it is in her extreme illness of 1373 that she experiences her visions. As is typical of Margery’s narrative, the vision that restores her to mental and bodily health is strikingly material: she sees Christ in the likeness of a ‘most beauteous, and most amiable’ man, dressed in purple silk, seated by her bedside and speaking: ‘Daughter, why have you forsaken me, and I never forsook you?’ (42). The experience embodies the injunction of Nicholas Love to imagine Christ as ‘a fair young man at the age of thirty-three’ (Love 2004, p. 159, modernised

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spelling). The vivid details of Christ’s beauty and clothing, and the directness of his address to Margery, establish the predominant style of her book, which will be structured by a series of deeply personal conversations with Christ and by accompanying experiences of revelation – voices, visions and other sensory manifestations. Margery’s resolution not to sin following her restoration to health is presented as occasioned by fear rather than devotion, and swiftly lapses. Her second visionary experience, by contrast, functions as a conversion, moving her to a life-long practice of piety. The experience and its effects are deeply sensory: Margery leaps out of bed hearing surpassingly sweet music, and is moved to high devotion, manifest in extreme weeping (46). The heavenly music recalls Rolle’s account of hearing a celestial melody, and his repeated use of such imagery to convey the joys of heaven (93). The contrast is also striking: Rolle hears music as he is praying, his soul reaching towards heaven, and his meditation becomes a song, whereas Margery’s experience is unsought and purely affective. Its power, as Atkinson notes, is the more striking for the lack of words or accompanying revelatory experience (1983, p. 43). The radical nature of Margery’s account should not be underestimated: mystical writers refer repeatedly to the dangers of such visionary experience, and the possibility that it may be sent by the devil rather than God – a possibility that Margery returns to across the book. Readers of The Cloud of Unknowing are warned not to seek physical expressions of ecstasy: to enter the dark cloud of ignorance where the divine may be approached is to reject both affective and intellective experience. It is acceptable to be moved, but the individual must beware the origins of such affect, and the mad behaviours that can result from confusing interior and exterior, mental and physical: ‘the devil is able to deceive them with false lights and sounds, sweet odours and wonderful tastes, glowing and burning in their hearts or stomachs, backs or loins or limbs’.22 Revelations have spiritual meaning and should not be expected to be physically manifest. The imagination, argues the Cloud-author, has the dangerous ability to project images or hallucinations onto the mind (139), whereas it is by unknowing that we should know. Yet it is precisely physical sensory experience that characterises so many of Margery’s visions, and that leads her on her spiritual journey. The contrast points up just how dubious this experience may have seemed in its own time. Hilton in The Scale of Perfection articulates similar concerns, distinguishing vision from true contemplation (83–84). He recognises that the fire of divine love may affect, even afflict, the body (101–2), and that visions may be good, effected by angels, but cautions that they may also be caused by demons (84) – an anxiety which for Margery is resolved by the positive spiritual impact of her visions. Hilton might seem to have Margery directly in mind as he argues that pure desire for Jesus should take precedence over bodily penances and ‘all visions or revelations of angels appearing, songs and sounds, savors or smells, burnings and delights felt by the body’ (20), just as the heavenly Jerusalem should take precedence over the earthly. His treatise Of Angels’ Song, perhaps

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written in response to Rolle’s The Fire of Love, similarly cautions against ‘all bodily imaginations, figures and fantasies of creatures’, and ‘wonderful sounds and songs’, which may be caused by ‘troubling of the brain’, as opposed to spiritual song, heard in the heart (Hilton 1994, pp. 132, 134, modernised spelling). Rolle’s account of his own multi-sensory, embodied experience of the fire of love and the music of paradise, and his deep spiritual yearning, must have offered valuable consolation and assurance to Margery that such experiences could be both licit and longed-for. As Margery’s conversation with Julian demonstrates, although delusion had to be guarded against, it was recognised that visions – like Julian’s own ‘showings’ – might be divinely inspired, sent by good spirits. The late fourteenth-century treatise The Chastising of God’s Children by John of Ruusbroec, written to instruct a female religious and translated into Middle English, emphasises the circumstantiality of discernment: good visions are true and edifying, and prompt goodness, chastity and obedience in the soul.23 Margery’s book charts that journey of discernment.

Bodily purgations: chastity and tears Margery’s conversion is deeply embodied, enacted through a self-imposed regime of purgation that emulates illness: the body voluntarily chastised through her desire to ‘live chaste’, and her ‘great bodily penance’ (47) of frequent confession, prayer, fasting, vegetarianism and wearing a hair-shirt, accompanied by the tears that become a leitmotif of the book.24 This early period in particular is marked by a sense of conflict as Margery battles against the devil – and against earthly desire. All events are understood to reflect either benign or malign intention, sent by God or the devil, and the self is intimately connected with the divine order of the universe. Margery’s ambition becomes spiritual assertiveness, her relationship with Christ both rendering all else insignificant and transforming her worldview. Sexuality is a central aspect of this transformation. Following her vision of Paradise, sexual relations become abhorrent to her: ‘she would rather… have eaten and drunk the ooze and muck in the gutter’ (46). Margery imagines herself as Christ’s spouse, daughter and mother, but the image of Jesus as lover provides her with the most powerful and immediate metaphor for intimacy, and her spiritual experience is conveyed in notably earthly, erotic terms: Therefore I [ Jesus] must be intimate [‘homely’] with you, and lie in your bed with you…. Therefore you can boldly take me in the arms of your soul and kiss my mouth, my head, and my feet as sweetly as you want. (126–127) Margery had many models on which to draw, from the Song of Songs onwards: Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, employs the imagery of the ‘threefold’

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kiss, while other female mystics exploit the erotic possibilities of spiritual marriage – but her interpretation is also startlingly literal.25 Correspondingly, temptation for Margery is also often sexual. Her desire for spiritual marriage is threatened by her lust for a particular man, who later cruelly rejects her, and she is tormented by grotesque sexual visions, ‘horrible and abominable visions… of seeing men’s genitals, and other such abominations’ (184). Margery’s experiences reflect a recurring anxiety regarding her own sexuality: not only does she experience illicit desire, but also, unlike the virgin martyrs of legend or the ideal holy woman, she is married and a mother. A central topic of her dialogues with the Lord is her wish to be equated with the virgin saints and to receive similar spiritual rewards by undertaking a chaste marriage. Although Christ refers to the traditional hierarchy of chastity which places virginity highest, He also assures Margery that she is as beloved as a maiden or widow would be (85). The narrative echoes Christ’s assurance to St Bridget that ‘Maidenhood is good’, emulating the angels, and that ‘a wife or widow may merit a reward equal to a meek maiden’ (Bridget of Sweden 1987, p. 316, my translation). The idea is radically developed in Margery’s book, when Christ identifies her as a maiden in her soul (88). His statement opposes the notion of the virgin’s preeminence with the assertion of the equal value of physical and spiritual chastity, an argument made by various theologians but rarely finding its way into literary texts (see Saunders 2001, pp. 76–151). Margery’s book presents a remarkably liberal view of chastity; it questions the absolute status of virginity by implying that a married woman’s chastity is as valuable to the Lord in heaven, and that the ideal of virginity is a spiritual one. At the same time, this symbolic empowerment is essential to Margery’ existence. She needs to align herself with the virgins, to construct her earthly marriage as chaste and her true marriage as spiritual, and to resist sexual temptation. The importance of spiritual virginity is pointed up by Margery’s constant fears of rape while on pilgrimage. Ultimately, Margery writes herself as a woman empowered by chastity and comparable to the virgin saints of legend. Margery’s embodied holiness was extreme not only in its voluntary aspects of chastity and abstinence but also in its involuntary and invasive qualities. The unease with which she was viewed, as well as her own uncertainty regarding her spiritual gifts, is most evident in the descriptions of her compulsive weeping, which commences with her first vision of heaven and continues over her entire life. Tears are a familiar and central feature of affective piety: seen as emblematic of the opening of the self to God, they mark a recognition of the frailty of humankind and the sinfulness of the world, and prove the physical affect of contemplation. As Christ wept for humanity, so humanity should weep for Him and for themselves. Margery prays fervently for a ‘well of tears’ (117), and is given precisely this ‘singular and… special gift’ (136). Her tears are a crucial aspect of her revelatory experience: they occur in holy places, or when she is reminded of heavenly things, and they mark her recognition of her own sinfulness, but they are also extreme and

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compulsive, a public proof of God’s inspiration. When Margery travels to Jerusalem, tears are metamorphosed into something stranger, a ‘crying and roaring’: And this kind of crying lasted for many years after this time, despite any­ thing that anyone might do, and she suffered much contempt and much reproof for it. The crying was so loud and so amazing that it astounded people, unless they had heard it before, or else knew the reason for the crying. (104) Windeatt suggests analogies with Christ’s weeping, following his last words on the Cross, and the Virgin’s swoon at His death, both described in Nicholas Love’s The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, as well as with accounts of the tears of St Bridget and of contemporary pilgrims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Love 2004, pp. 178, 180; Kempe 2004, 2207n.; 2212n.). The Virgin emphasises to Margery her own and Mary Magdalene’s crying and weeping (109), and Margery’s identification with the Virgin’s suffering, in particular, provokes her own fervent weeping and sobbing. The Book makes much of the extraordinary quality of Margery’s ‘plentiful tears and violent sobbings, with loud crying and shrill shriekings’ (144): the more she tries to suppress them, the more they burst out and she falls down crying out ‘astonishingly loud’ (105). While she weeps for her own sins, the slander she meets also aligns her with Christ. She is disarmingly candid about the responses elicited by her behaviour: For some said it was a wicked spirit tormented her; some said it was an illness; some said she had drunk too much wine; some cursed her; some wished she was in the harbour; some wished she was on the sea in a bottomless boat…. Other, spiritually inclined men loved her and esteemed her all the more. (105) Margery’s recognition of the strangeness of her own conduct is a recurring subject of her conversations with the Lord. The narrative also, however, articulates a consciousness of the prominence of weeping in the lives of female mystics: the friar who forbids her to enter the church because her crying drowns out the sermon comes to believe in Margery after reading of the debilitating and ‘abundant tears’ (191) of Mary of Oignies, which, like Margery’s, increase the more she attempts to repress them, and which inspire copious tears in the priest who has condemned her (Brown 2008, pp. 92–95). Tears are a critical feature of Catherine of Siena’s writing, and tears and compulsive cries also figure prominently in the lives of Bridget of Sweden, Elizabeth of Hungary and Angela of Foligno. Despite these familiar interpretations of

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such behaviours as visible signs of holiness and divine inspiration, and even as Margery is drawn to enact them on the public stage, the sense of discomfort and wonder they cause is sustained throughout.

Voices and visions Margery’s behaviours and unusual experiences have attracted a variety of medical diagnoses, from hysteria to psychosis to temporal lobe epilepsy.26 Her early illness is indeed readily understood as postpartum psychosis (Atkinson 1983, p. 209); her compulsive crying, sometimes accompanied by falling on the ground and turning blue, may suggest epilepsy; and it is not uncommon for seizures to be accompanied by auditory-visual hallucinations (McCarthy-Jones 2012, p. 122). The flying white spots that Margery takes to be angels may be explained as the optical disturbance that accompanies migraine. To some extent Margery’s experiences also fit contemporary medical models of voice-hearing experience: there are ‘proximal’ triggers for her experience, most often ‘the silence of a church or oratory’, and ‘distal’ triggers, in particular the experience of childbirth (McCarthy-Jones 2012, p. 35). Neurological and psychopathological explanations are, however, limited: there is no evidence for positive voices heard during seizures, and certainly not for extended conversations with the Lord; while to interpret Margery’s voice-hearing as a phenomenon of loneliness seems unpersuasive, especially given her quite remarkably social existence.27 Modern medical interpretations demonstrate to an extent that Margery could have had the experiences she describes, but they also show how far those experiences surpass clinical description and explanation. Medical explanations are also reductive, because they do not capture Margery’s or her contemporaries’ understandings of her experiences, nor their cultural and literary contexts. Margery’s Book makes their strangeness explicit, but also authorises them; in contemporary secular society, without the explanatory frame of the supernatural, they seem considerably stranger.28 Within bio-medical discourse, only the language of delusion and hallucination is available. Non-medical narratives of unusual experience in the healthy population provide closer analogues, particularly accounts of religious experience within evangelical, Catholic and Quaker communities, as well as in Islamic, Asian and African traditions.29 Like these, Margery’s unusual experiences must be approached as aspects of her spiritual life, in keeping with those recounted in the writings that shaped her individual piety. Her physical symptoms contributed in crucial ways to her larger mystical experience and spiritual development, understood as signs of God’s embodied presence in her and of her relationship with the Lord and as evidence to the outside world. External, physical manifestations, then, both signify and are complemented by Margery’s rich inner life, which is marked by profoundly multi-­ sensory ‘visions’. Whereas now, accounts of multi-sensory or ‘fused vision’ are very rare, and hearing voices is privileged in public perceptions of unusual

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experiences, in medieval writing multi-sensory experience is the norm, and it is rare to find voice-hearing treated in isolation. Like Julian, Margery emphasises the spiritual (‘gostli’) eye, but such seeing is shorthand for the engagement of all the senses as she enters into a dramatic spiritual world, where she participates in central biblical scenes related to the life of Christ: the birth and childhood of the Virgin, the birth of Jesus, the Passion, the grief of Mary, Mary Magdalene, and the disciples, and the Virgin’s death. Margery busies herself as the maidservant of St Anne, mother of the Virgin, looking after the child Mary; begs clothes and food in Bethlehem, swaddling the baby Jesus; and after the Crucifixion, returns again to serve Mary by making her a drink of gruel and spiced wine (236). Margery enacts her roles of mother and housekeeper within the world of the inward eye, to serve not her husband and family but Christ. Again and again, she reiterates that what she sees with the spiritual or inner eye rivals or surpasses that of the bodily eye. Her experience clearly fits the model advocated by treatises on devotional reading, vividly described, for example, in the prose meditation ‘Of Three Workings in Man’s Soul’, which asks readers to imagine within their souls the Virgin Mary – her face and manner, her devout attitude and silent reading (Hayes 1995, p. 194). Margery’s enactment of such imagining within the soul is portrayed most of all as that of a willing recipient. While she directs her thoughts to holy things, the Lord is consistently identified as the source of such imaginings, putting them into the soul’s eye: ‘our Lord revealed to her soul’ ‘meditations and high contemplations, and other secret things’ (69). Her vision of St Anne giving birth to Mary is inspired by her direct question as she lies in meditation, ‘Jesus, what shall I think about?’ (52). Jesus’ instruction, ‘Daughter, think of my mother’, opens onto the vision, described in terms of seeing, but fully multi-sensory (52). Her experiences are startling, absorbing and immediate, as when she sees the Crucifixion ‘as if Christ had hung before her bodily eye’ (105). Even for Margery, the nature of such visionary experience is complex: it is divinely inspired, but she also recognises its resonance with the lives of holy women and the devotional texts she reads, and this in part affords its authority. The visions have their own logic, often connected with liturgical festivals – Easter or Candlemas – or with the places Margery visits, especially Jerusalem. Late in the book, a different type of visionary experience is introduced, that of dream vision: in sleep that she cannot resist, she sees the angelic vision of the Book of Life and while sleeping in the Chapel of Our Lady, the Lord’s crucified body. She also experiences physical miracles, evidence of grace perceived with the bodily eye, as when she sees the Sacrament fluttering as a dove (83; Margery recalls St Bridget’s Eucharistic vision). The ‘great comforts’ she feels are both ‘spiritual’ and ‘bodily’ – smells sweeter than any earthly smell, sounds and melodies, delicate and comforting white specks that betoken angels (124), affects that are connected with the token of flame she feels burning in her breast for sixteen years (124–125; annotated with a flame in the manuscript), and which can also cause her cryings to break out (148).

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She articulates clearly the affective power of such experience: through these spiritual sights her ‘affection’ is entirely drawn into the manhood of Christ and the memory of his Passion, and ultimately into his ‘incomprehensible Godhead’ (249).30 Despite the powerfully multi-sensory quality of Margery’s visions, the voice of the Lord remains pre-eminent across the book. She questions its origins and is reassured by its affects: ‘she firmly and steadfastly believed that it was God that spoke in her soul, and no evil spirit, for in his speech she had most strength and most comfort and most increase of virtue’ (256). The narrative conveys an acute awareness of different ways of hearing as it does of different kinds of seeing: exterior, interior, in the mind, in the soul. References to speech, words and conversation, the Lord ‘saying’ to Margery, occur again and again. She converses not only with the Lord, but also the Virgin and the saints – Peter, Paul, Mary Magdalene, Katherine, Margaret (256). Most of all, the emphasis is on the ‘wonderful speeches and conversation which our Lord spoke and conveyed to her soul’ (34): Our Lord, of his mercy, visited her so much and so plentifully with his holy speeches and his holy dalliance, that many times she did not know how the day went…. It was so sweet and so devout that it was as if she had been in heaven. (256) The phrase ‘in her soul’ recurs across the book: it is here that the Lord speaks to her and such ‘dalliance’ ‘ravishes’ her spirit. Dalliance in this now obsolete sense signifies ‘Talk, confabulation, converse, chat; usually of a light or familiar kind, but also used of serious conversation or discussion’ (OED n., 1). The term can be found in medieval religious works, as in the moral treatise Dives and Pauper (‘Reading and dalliance of holy writ and of holy men’s lives’) and Osbern Bokenham’s Lives of the Saints, where it refers to Martha’s conversation with Christ (OED citations), but its other meanings of social converse and amorousness may also lend to Margery’s use of the term the sense of intimacy. As with Margery’s visions, the spontaneity of hearing the Lord’s voice is combined with a sense of active participation and examination. The soul must be appropriately receptive to the Lord: it is ‘at rest in her soul’ that she has ‘high contemplation day by day, and many a holy speech and confabulation with our Lord Jesus Christ’ (64). Margery pleases the Lord by being ‘in silence’ and allowing him to ‘speak in [her] soul’ (125). She is loath to care for her husband in his illness because she will not then be able to ‘attend’ (220) to the Lord: such attending is equated to praying in church, to which there are many references. Ravishment, joy and dalliance are often depicted in terms of other senses, especially as ‘sweetness’ (103), as well as by the experience of ‘sweet tears of high devotion’ (64), the fire or flame of love (125), and physical ‘falling’ (103). But the book is also marked by an awareness of the gap between

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words and spiritual experience; grace is ‘high above her reason’ (34), and what she hears is repeatedly characterised as mysterious, mystical, ‘secrets of her soul’ (69), though aspects of these can be related: she tells Richard Caister, Vicar of St Stephen’s, Norwich, ‘all the words which God had revealed to her in her soul’ (74). Meditations, speeches, showings, revelations blur, yet Margery can sometimes seem to be probing the nature of her experience: she describes to the English friar she meets at Assisi ‘her manner of life, her feelings, her revelations, and the grace that God wrought in her soul by holy inspirations and high contemplations, and how our Lord talked to her soul in a kind of conversation’ (115, my italics). This could be understood as a metaphor, but in the context of the many dialogues and conversations recounted across the book, it reads rather as Margery’s attempt to capture the nature of her experience: she seems to hear a voice in her soul – perhaps in her mind, perhaps the experience of a soundless voice described by contemporary voice-hearers. When she is sinful, holy speeches are denied her, replaced by evil thoughts inspired by the devil’s voice: now the devil ‘ordered her in her mind’ (184) to choose which man she will prostitute herself with; her narrative suggests the experiences both of voice-hearing and intrusive thoughts. Her prayer evokes ‘her good angel’ (184), who speaks to explain that she will be punished for twelve days for not believing it is the Lord who speaks; Margery’s return to grace is marked by the Lord speaking to her once more. The voices Margery hears are not exclusively interior: lying in bed, she hears ‘with her bodily ears a loud voice calling, “Margery”’; on waking, God speaks directly to her, ‘Daughter’ (169–170). Nor are they accurately conveyed by the notion of auditory hallucination, in that they are notably dialogic. Her conversations with God, often described as visitations while contemplating, can be very extended (such as the late disquisitions on charity and love and on heavenly reward, ch. 65 and ch. 86). She converses extensively with the Virgin, and is instructed to receive the apostles, Mary Magdalene and other saints within her soul. The Lord’s voice also figures as a familiar aspect of Margery’s mind, a voice offering her guidance in her day-to-day decisions and a running commentary of a dialogic kind on her life – an experience described by some contemporary voice-hearers. The Lord is deeply practical: He offers guidance on where Margery should go, to whom she should speak and what she should say (particularly when it is confrontational), how she should treat her husband, what ship she should take, what ascetic practices she should adopt and when, how she should dress, and that she should write the book. He offers assurances of her wellbeing, safety and health, and the security of people and places around her, offering interpretative frames for natural events such as the snowstorm that saves the church of Bishop’s Lynn from fire in 1420/1421, for societal responses to her, and for her own physical state. The conversational mode is present throughout, but becomes more prominent – by contrast to multi-sensory vision – later in the narrative. Sounds more generally are a special aspect of God’s teaching from Margery’s first hearing of heavenly music. Later, ‘so terrible a melody that she could

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not bear it’ (74) causes her to faint, and she hears ‘with her bodily ears such sounds and melodies that she could not hear what anyone said to her’ (124); she also hears ‘great sounds and great melodies with her bodily ears’ that again signal heavenly merriment (225–226). The scenes contrast interestingly with Rolle’s account of hearing heavenly music, which he specifies is not heard by those around him, and which emphasises the ambiguity of the experience: ‘I heard, above my head it seemed, the joyful ring of psalmody, or perhaps I should say, the singing’ (93). Margery also emphasises the diversity of sounds heard with the bodily ear that characterise her revelatory experience – from the sound of bellows, to the voice of a dove, to the song of a robin, all followed by ‘great grace’ (127). The emphasis on sound seems fitting for an author whose voice is so marked, not by words only, but also by the weeping and shrieking, crying and roaring that cannot be contained.

Expressing the inexpressible How can we express the ineffable, the ‘many secret things’ (34) that she experiences, Margery herself asks? Words gesture towards but never entirely capture feeling, always at a remove from experience: Nor could she herself ever tell of the grace that she felt, it was so heavenly, so high above her reason and her bodily wits; and her body so feeble at the time of the presence of grace that she could never express it with her words as she felt it in her soul. (34) The book returns again and again to the gap between earthly and celestial, the impossibility of articulating the sublime: her spiritual joy and comfort are ‘so marvellous that she could never tell of it as she felt it’ (250); her holy thoughts ‘so subtle and heavenly that she could never describe them afterwards, as she had them in feeling’ (232). The gap is pointed up by Margery’s homely images and metaphors: ‘I would for your love… be chopped up as small as meat for the pot’ (181). Margery’s words mark the attempt of an uneducated, in some ways simple, woman, to convey complex philosophical and theological concepts. It is the emotion behind the images that is effective. But the nature of Margery’s most extreme and renowned gift is also significant. The strange invasion of the body in her cryings becomes at once a physical sign sent by God, a spiritual test, and the means to illumination of the soul. These wordless sounds also capture the unknowability, the impossibility of articulating in language, the nature of the divine. Margery’s noise – in all its senses – made her both remarkable and distrusted, yet it was precisely through that noise that she left her mark on society. Through the writing of her book, through the medium of scribes and through the conventions of devotional writing, Margery’s extraordinary voice takes on a new authority, but its originality and difference is never

The mystical theology of Margery Kempe  53

entirely absorbed within these. Her inner eye and ear open onto rich imaginative landscapes and her homely yet profound narrative, over half a millennium on, can still speak to us of deep and immediate spiritual experience and revelation. Hers is a specifically and idiosyncratically female imitatio Christi – the model offered by so many contemplative texts – distinguished by its unique combination of ‘voluntary and involuntary’ elements (Kempe 2003, p. 15), and by the experiences ‘so high above her bodily wits that she could never express them with her bodily tongue just as she felt them’ (242). We can never fully know ‘the converse that our Lord communicated to her soul’ (243) and yet, the book also tells us much about the process of that conversation. Finally, Margery’s life and her book remain deeply paradoxical. Her public behaviour is as radical as her theology is conservative; her book has familiar sources and analogues and yet is remarkably daring in its choice to foreground both bodily and spiritual voices and visions, and in its adoption of a startlingly assertive affective mode that embraces extremes and the extraordinary in its tracing of a rich and unique inner life.

Notes 1 The definitive scholarly edition of The Book of Margery Kempe is by Barry Windeatt (Kempe 2004a), to whom I am very grateful for comments on this essay. All references to the Book will be from Windeatt’s translation (Kempe 2004b), cited by page number. Margery was born c.1373 and met Julian c.1413; her book is dated c.1436–38. The unique manuscript is a copy and dates to c.1450. A sixteenth-­ century, probably Carthusian, annotator has written ‘dame Ielian’ in the outer margin next to the account of Margery’s meeting with Julian. 2 For the Revelations of Divine Love, see Julian of Norwich (1993) and (2016), translation (2015); for the shorter, earlier version, see also Julian of Norwich (2016). 3 On Margery’s life in its social context, see Goodman (2002). 4 For discussion and a full transcription of the manuscript annotations, see Kempe (2004a, pp. 439–52). 5 The modern title of the work is drawn from that of the pamphlet, A shorte treatyse of contemplacyon taught by our lorde Ihesu cryste, or taken out of the boke of Margerie kempe of Lynn: see Kempe (2004a, p. 1). See also Gardner (1966). 6 Pepwell’s headings refer to Margery as ‘Ancress of Lynn’; he closes the extract with the words, ‘Here endeth a short treatise of a devout ancress called Margery Kempe of Lynn.’ 7 See Hope Emily Allen’s prefatory note, in Kempe (1940, pp. lxiv–lxv), Atkinson (1983, pp. 197, 200, 210), and Beckwith (1986, pp. 37–40). Pearman reconsiders Margery’s ‘rewriting of her own bodily experiences’ from the perspective of contemporary disability studies (2010, p. 48). 8 Aers offers an influential example of this approach (1988, pp. 73–116). 9 My research for this essay has been generously funded by Wellcome Trust Strategic Awards WT086049 and WT098455MA, and grows out of my collaborative work on the ‘Hearing the Voice’ (http://hearingthevoice.org/) and ‘Life of Breath’ (http://www.lifeof breath.org/) projects. I am very grateful to my colleagues for their insights. On early narrative accounts of voice-hearing and neuroscientific and psychological theories, see McCarthy-Jones (2012), in particular pp. 11–37. 10 On the plurality and history of Christian mysticism, see Lamm (2013), which includes a substantial section on medieval mystics and traditions; see in particular

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11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Whitehead’s account of fourteenth-century English mystics (pp. 357–72). See also Andrew Louth’s chapter in the present volume. Hilton (1991), pp. 82, 81, 154. Further references are cited by page number. For the original Middle English, see Hilton (2000). Rolle (1972), p. 45. Further references are cited by page number. For the original text, see Rolle (1915). Hilton (1952), pp. 55, 53, 152, 51. For the original Middle English text, see Hilton (1983). Hirsh (1989) places Margery’s revelations in the context of secular devotional tradition, which had absorbed numerous mystical practices, in particular that of affective prayer, as well as of medieval devotional writings and modern evangelical practice. On Margery and the politics of sanctity, see Finke (1999, pp. 180–87). Recent research suggests that the Beguine communities may have been emulated informally in England by groups of devout women living together: see, for example, Tanner (1984, p. 65). For the Middle English Revelations, Life and Liber Celestis of St Bridget, see Bridget of Sweden (1987) and (1929). For the Middle English translations of these vitae see Brown (2008). On Margery’s prophetic role as a ‘secretary of God’, see Watt (1997, pp. 15–50) and (2007, pp. 116–35). Warren places Margery’s ‘life-writing’ within a tradition of embodied female spirituality, alongside two later writers, Anna Trapnel and Elizabeth Cary (2010, pp. 147–92). For discussion of references to Margery’s literacy and illiteracy, see Kempe (2004a, p. 9). Wolters (1978) pp. 122–23. For the Middle English text see Hodgson (1944). On Margery’s anxieties concerning delusion, and for relevant passages from The Chastising of God’s Children ( John of Ruusbroec 1957), see Kempe (2004a, 56n, 65n, 526-27n, 1302-3n, 1348n, 1355n). On body, voice and agency see McAvoy (2004). See Kempe (2004a, 2957n) and Glasscoe (1993, p. 296). Lipton argues that ‘the sacramental marriage model is central to Margery’s attempt to reconcile her spiritual ambitions with her bourgeois values’ (2007, pp. 129–60: p. 130). See Lawes (1999): Lawes argues against diagnoses of hysteria and psychosis, showing that a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy is more fitting, though still limited. McCarthy-Jones (2012, p. 282). For a general study applying contemporary biological and psychological ideas to mystical experience, see Kroll and Bachrach (2005). For a lucid overview of the limits of psychopathological diagnoses in relation to Margery Kempe, see Torn (2011a, b). On voice-hearing in modern evangelical tradition, see Luhrmann (2012). Windeatt signals a range of analogous descriptions, including of sweet smells in Julian of Norwich, and of dust particles in the sunlight in The Pilgrimage of the Soul (Kempe 2004a, 2863n and 2875–76n).

Bibliography Primary Sources Bridget of Sweden, Saint. (1929) The Revelations of Saint Birgitta. Ed. William Patterson Cumming. Early English Text Society OS 178. London: Oxford University Press.

The mystical theology of Margery Kempe  55 Bridget of Sweden, Saint. (1987) The Liber Celestis of St Bridget of Sweden. Ed. Roger Ellis. Vol. 1. Early English Text Society 291. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, Jennifer N. (2008) Three Women of Liège: A Critical Edition of and Commentary on the Middle English Lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie d’Oignies. Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 23. Turnhout: Brepols. Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint. (1996) The Two Middle English Translations of the Revelations of St Elizabeth of Hungary. Ed. Sarah McNamer. Middle English Texts 28. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Gardner, Edmund G., ed. (1966) The Cell of Self-Knowledge: Seven Early English Mystical Treatises (1910). New York: Cooper Square. www.ccel.org/ccel/gardner/cell/ files/cell.html Hayes, Stephen B., ed. (1995) Of Three Workings in Man’s Soul: A Middle English Prose Meditation on the Annunciation. In: Anne Clark Bartlett, Thomas Bestul, Janet Goebel and William F. Pollard (eds.), Vox Mystica: Essays for Valerie M. Lagorio. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, pp. 177–199. Hilton, Walter. (1952) The Goad of Love: An Unpublished Translation of the ‘Stimulus Amoris’ Formerly Attributed to St Bonaventura. Ed. Clare Kirchberger. Classics of the Contemplative Life. London: Faber and Faber. Hilton, Walter. (1957) The Ladder of Perfection. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin. Hilton, Walter. (1983) The Prickynge of Love. Ed. Harold Kane. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies. 2 vols. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik Universität Salzburg. Hilton, Walter. (1991) The Scale of Perfection. Trans. John P. H. Clark and Rosemary Dorward. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press. Hilton, Walter. (2000) The Scale of Perfection. Ed. Thomas H. Bestul. TEAMS Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University. Hodgson, Phyllis, ed. (1944) ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and ‘The Book of Privy Counselling’. Early English Text Society OS 218. London: Oxford University Press. Hodgson, Phyllis and Liegey, Gabriel M., eds. (1966) The Orcherd of Syon. Early ­English Text Society 258. London: Oxford University Press. John of the Cross, Saint. (1934–5) The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross. Ed. and trans. E. Allison Peers. 3 vols. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne. John of Ruusbroec. (1957) ‘The Chastising of God’s Children’ and ‘The Treatise of the Perfection of the Sons of God’. Ed. Joyce Bazire and Eric (Edmund) Colledge. ­Oxford: Blackwell. Julian of Norwich. (1993) A Revelation of Love. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Ed. Marion Glasscoe. Revised edn. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Julian of Norwich. (2015) Revelations of Divine Love. Trans. Barry Windeatt. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Julian of Norwich. (2016) Revelations of Divine Love. Ed. Barry Windeatt. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kempe, Margery. (1940) The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Sanford Brown Meech and Hope Emily Allen. Early English Text Society OS 212. London: Oxford University Press. Kempe, Margery. (2001) The Book of Margery Kempe: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. and trans. Lynn Staley. New York: W.W. Norton.

56  Corinne Saunders Kempe, Margery. (2003) The Book of Margery Kempe: An Abridged Translation. Trans. Liz Herbert McAvoy. Library of Medieval Women. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Kempe, Margery. (2004a) The Book of Margery Kempe. Ed. Barry Windeatt. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Kempe, Margery. (2004b) The Book of Margery Kempe. Trans. Barry Windeatt. ­L ondon: Penguin. Love, Nicholas. (2001) The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text. Ed. Michael G. Sargent. Exeter Medieval Texts and Studies. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Rolle, Richard. (1915) The ‘Incendium Amoris’ of Richard Rolle of Hampole. Ed. ­Margaret Deanesly. Manchester: The University Press. Rolle, Richard. (1972) The Fire of Love. Trans. Clifton Wolters. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Vitry, Jacques de. (2008) The Middle English Life of Marie d’Oignies by Jacques de Vitry. In: Jennifer N. Brown, Three Women of Liège: A Critical Edition of and Commentary on the Middle English Lives of Elizabeth of Spalbeek, Christina Mirabilis, and Marie d’Oignies (eds), Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts 23. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 85–190. Windeatt, Barry, ed. (1994) English Mystics of the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolter, Clifton, trans. (1978) The Cloud of Unknowing and Other Works. Harmonds­ worth: Penguin.

Secondary Sources Aers, David. (1988) Community, Gender, and Individual Identity: English Writing 1360–1430. London: Routledge. Allen, Hope Emily. (1934) ‘A Medieval Work: Margery Kempe of Lynn.’ Letters to the Editor, The Times, 27 December. Arnold, John and Lewis, Katherine J., eds. (2004) A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Atkinson, Clarissa W. (1983) Mystic and Pilgrim: The ‘Book’ and the World of Margery Kempe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Beckwith, Sarah. (1986) ‘A Very Material Medievalism: The Medieval Mysticism of Margery Kempe.’ In: Aers, D. (ed.), Medieval Literature: Criticism, Ideology and History. New York: St Martin’s Press, pp. 34–57 Carruthers, Mary. (1990) The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 10. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cross, F.L. and Livingstone, E.A., eds. (1997) The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Finke, Laurie A. (1999) Women’s Writing in English: Medieval England. London: Longman. Glasscoe, Marion. (1993) English Medieval Mystics: Games of Faith. Longman Medieval and Renaissance Library. London: Longman. Goodman, Anthony. (2002) Margery Kempe and her World. Harlow: Longman. Hirsh, John. (1989) The Revelations of Margery Kempe: Paramystical Practices in Late Medieval England, Medieval and Renaisance Authors. Leiden: Brill. Kroll, Jerome and Bachrach, Bernard. (2005) The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of ­Medieval Mystics and Ascetics. New York: Routledge.

The mystical theology of Margery Kempe  57 Lamm, Julia A., ed. (2013) The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism. Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Religion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Lawes, Richard. (1999) ‘The Madness of Margery Kempe.’ In: Glasscoe, Marion (ed.), The Medieval Mystical Tradition: England, Ireland, and Wales. Exeter Symposium VI: Papers Read at Charney Manor, July 1999. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, pp. 147–167. Lipton, Emma. (2007) Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Luhrmann, T.M. (2012) When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. McAvoy, Liz Herbert. (2004) Authority and the Female Body in the Writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Studies in Medieval Mysticism. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. McCarthy-Jones, Simon. (2012) Hearing Voices: The Histories, Causes and Meanings of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pearman, Tory Vandeventer. (2010) Women and Disability in Medieval Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Salih, Sarah. (2004) ‘Margery’s Bodies: Piety, Work and Penance’. In: Arnold, John H. and Lewis, Katherine J. (eds), A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, pp. 161–176. Saunders, Corinne. (2001) Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Staley, Lynn. (1994) Margery Kempe’s Dissenting Fictions. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Tanner, Norman. (1984) The Church in Late Medieval Norwich, 1370–1532. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Torn, Alison. (2011a) ‘Looking Back: Medieval Mysticism or Psychosis’. The Psychologist 24(10), pp. 788–790. Torn, Alison. (2011b) ‘Madness and Mysticism: Can a Mediaeval Narrative Inform our Understanding of Psychosis?’ History and Philosophy of Psychology, 13, 1–14. Underhill, Evelyn. (1914) Mysticism: A Study in the Nature and Development of Man’s Spiritual Consciousness, 5th edn. London: Methuen. Warren, Nancy Bradley. (2010) The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350–1700. Reformations: Medieval and Early Modern. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame. Watt, Diane. (1997) Secretaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early ­Modern England. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer. Watt, Diane. (2007) Medieval Women’s Writing: Works by and for Women in England, 1100–1500. Cambridge: Polity. Whitehead, Christiania. (2013) ‘The Late Fourteenth-Century English Mystics’. In: Lamm, Julia. A. (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism. Wiley-Blackwell Companions to Religion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 357–372. Windeatt, Barry. (2004) ‘Introduction: Reading and Re-reading The Book of Margery Kempe’. In: Arnold, John H. and Lewis, Katherine J. (eds), A Companion to the Book of Margery Kempe. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, pp. 1–16.

4 Unlikely mystics Durham Cathedral as mystical space for ordinary people Rosalind Brown

Abstract This chapter draws on direct quotations from visitors and the volunteers who welcome them to highlight aspects of people’s experience of the numinous, the holy, in Durham Cathedral, which has been a place of prayer and pilgrimage for over 900 years. Children’s experience is considered, as is that of adults who come with little or no faith and find themselves somehow touched. The Cathedral is experienced as a place for memory making and, for some, life-changing decisions. The author reflects on questions surrounding photography and the Lego® Cathedral before suggesting ways the Cathedral can respond to unlikely mystics who visit.

Introduction Durham Cathedral has been a place of pilgrimage and prayer since building began in 1093 to replace a Saxon Cathedral and shrine to St Cuthbert. The body of St Cuthbert was placed in its new shrine, the Feretory, in 1104 and the Cathedral was completed by 1133. Durham was a Benedictine monastery for 450 years and England’s principal centre for pilgrimage until the murder of Thomas a Becket increased pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral. In the 1530s Henry VIII’s commissioners damaged the shrine but, on seeing St Cuthbert’s body was incorrupt, did not destroy it and the monks later reburied it in the Feretory. Bede’s shrine was similarly destroyed and his bones buried beneath the former shrine. The monastery was dissolved in 1539 but the buildings survived largely unscathed and a secular (non-monastic) Cathedral was re-founded in 1541. The Cathedral rises above the River Wear in photogenic splendour but cannot be seen until the last minute when approaching from the city centre. Arriving at the Cathedral from any direction takes determination involving steep hills and narrow, cobbled, paths. Each person who arrives has made an effort, there are no casual visitors. The building itself is massive, with sturdy nave pillars rising to the clerestory, a high ceiling and a long view from west to east. Recently the Cathedral has been voted both Britain’s ‘favourite’ and ‘best loved’ building and welcomes over 700,000 people each year. Unlike most

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other cathedrals, a significant number are local people who have a sense of ownership of the building and St Cuthbert; they talk of ‘popping in to have a word with Cuthbert’. This sense of familiarity transcends religious commitment. People who walk into Durham Cathedral for the first time stop in their tracks and say ‘Wow!’ Even people of no faith find themselves experiencing something unexpected which some then express in religious or spiritual terms. At the same time, Christians draw inspiration and strength through praying in the Cathedral especially, but not only, at the Shrine of St Cuthbert. The Cathedral is a ‘prayed-in’ place and stories of answered prayer abound. The lack of admission charge (a deliberate decision by the Cathedral Chapter,1 despite the effect on the budget) influences people’s relationship with the building. They come as guests not as paying visitors. While the Chapter does not allow questionnaires or overt research in the church, believing that people should be able to visit without explaining themselves, we collect stories of people’s experiences as recounted in conversation or writing and collaborate with researchers working on aspects of the Cathedral’s life. Some of the most illuminating and powerful insights into the Cathedral as mystical space come from stories and comments. While many focus on aesthetics, ‘beautiful’ appearing frequently in the visitors’ book, others describe how people coming to the Cathedral find themselves encountering something more than physical beauty, something ‘other’, which evokes a response to the sacred space. Often this is simply a raw response that ‘something has happened’: it is too immediate to make sense of it. Others have a more clearly articulated sense of the experience. Many stories refer to visits some years previously and describe an experience that has not diminished in its impact. Like Philip Larkin’s surprise at a hunger to be more serious,2 people experience the cathedral opening a yearning they did not know was there and may not be able to articulate. The Cathedral functions as liminal space, it becomes more than an historic building and somehow un-seats people who find themselves almost involuntarily vulnerable to mystery. So, a story from many years ago: A local church member offered hospitality to overseas schoolchildren on official visits. At the height of the Cold War a Russian party came under the eagle eye of a commissar who wouldn’t enter the Cathedral with them. But the weather was truly filthy and when the tour ended the hard-boiled commissar was found sitting near the font. He was crying his eyes out and said, ‘I had to come in – and this place has just done something to me.’ And, more recently: I spoke to a man from Lancashire who claimed to be a ‘secular’ man. I told him he could not be secular in a place like Durham Cathedral. He confessed that he felt very moved by it.

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Visitors’ experiences in their own words Our Visitors’ book3 records responses to the aesthetics of the Cathedral (most frequently, ‘beautiful’) and the feelings of well-being this evokes in people which are commonly related to awe or well-being: Beautiful, serene church. An amazing, homely place. (child) My second home.4 The welcome and peace gave me comfort. Very peaceful. I found some inner peace. (Netherlands) Mind-healing. (China) Came back for the sheer joy of the place. (Ireland) Always brings a smile to my face being here. Moments of perspective and clarity gained. Just what I needed. Thank you for helping me sense inner peace. Fabulous – and such a relief to the soul, just for a few minutes. I travel from Yorkshire to Durham Cathedral as often as I can as it is a place of spiritual refreshment for me. Some comments hint at what might have been some form of incipient mystical experience even though there is no indication the person actively responded to it: One of the most beautiful places I have ever been. One might feel the power, grace and beauty of the Lord here. It was humbling and uplifting. (USA) Breathtakingly beautiful. Thank you for this experience. (Canada) So beautiful. Got me emotional. Perfect is the correct word. Choir was exquisite. Never before been in such awe. I am not deeply religious but there is something about this place that is extremely moving. As ever welcoming, warm but intensely spiritual. (Australia) Others are lost for words. ‘Breath-taking’ is a common phrase: No words adequately describe this place. Gorgeous. (USA) Lost for words. (Canada) Mind-blowing. Unimaginable beauty. (USA) Speechless, so beautiful. (South Africa) Spellbinding. The choice of words is interesting. Well-being can nudge at the person’s boundaries in ways that should engender a response; others wrote, ‘inspirational’, ‘powerful’, ‘humbling’, ‘uplifting’. Augustine’s words cross the centuries:

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Late have I loved you, O, Beauty so ancient and so new, … you touched me, and I burned for your peace.5 The challenge in our mission at the Cathedral is to help people move from the experience of beauty, which is good and wonderful in itself, towards an experience of God. Like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, this cannot be forced without doing damage. Our approach to evangelism is more covert than overt, letting the Cathedral do its own work in each visitor’s life. Creating an environment in which encounter with God might happen begins with welcoming people, in the Benedictine tradition, as though they are Christ. Stewards greet people briefly and give them a bookmark which has a brief welcome, prayer and service information. Many people express pleasant surprise that not only do we not charge for admission but the first thing we do is give them something. That changes the relationship from one of being a customer buying a ticket, with accompanying expectations of entitlement and overtones of a museum or art gallery containing things to look at, to being welcomed as a guest in a place that resounds with living faith and invites people to move beyond looking at tangible artefacts to being open to the God who inspired them.6 We try not to over-interpret the church, letting it speak for itself and invite people to sense the numinous, the spiritual: territory that is a foreign land to so many people today. We have bibles, prayer books and hymnbooks in the pews, a chaplain available for conversations, and leaflets about the Christian faith. Our aim is to help people move forward on their spiritual journey from wherever they start. Many come with no active faith and may surprise themselves. Although they may not yet understand, they know that in some way God has welcomed them. It may be a tiny step of awakening or the beginning of conscious encounter with God. Thus, a Malaysian visitor, referring to the card which offers help for people who do not know how to pray, wrote: ‘I don’t know how to pray but thanks to “How to pray” I know a wee bit now. Lovely cathedral.’ I met a young Moslem family who were interested in Bede. The father spoke movingly of the way the building expresses the daring, robust faith of the builders who expressed their vision of God in stone. He had let the building speak to him, telling a story in stone of a faith that was not his own. Others find themselves being surprised by their response: A man remarked that he was not totally antagonistic towards religion, but felt it was responsible for much of the misery in the world. He said that this morning he had begun to realise the attraction of Christianity. A student asked a chaplain: ‘I have grown up abroad and had little contact with religion. Yet, when I sit in Durham Cathedral I feel something. Can you tell me what it is?’ Some Jewish friends who are atheists are intrigued by the architectural engineering of cathedrals. We brought them to Durham and while

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walking around one said, ‘When you’re in a place like this it makes you wonder if there isn’t something to it after all.’ Many people comment on the prayerful atmosphere. These walls have witnessed over nine centuries of prayer and, when praying where so many others have prayed before us, ‘spirituality’ ceases to be entirely individualistic and self-determined, as is so common today, but becomes a response to something beyond our own frame of reference, something more than aesthetic beauty, something Christians call ‘holy’. People express this in various ways: When, on holiday in the West Country, I was asked where I came from the shop assistant said, ‘Oh I love Durham; it’s my favourite cathedral. It has such a wonderful atmosphere; you can feel the centuries of prayer.’ A middle aged man was praying. Afterwards he remarked that it was quite wonderful. He lived in Australia and had never visited Durham before. He said he was quite overwhelmed by the sense of the holiness of the place. A BBC engineer from a long line of Methodists said that, while he believed you could find God anywhere, he had never been so aware of a sense of prayer as in the Cathedral. Two Nigerian visitors said they were overwhelmed by the experience and strongly felt the presence of God in this place. A Chinese woman who had just arrived in Durham sat in the nave for Evensong. Next day she sent me an e-mail: ‘I am truly blessed. While sitting at the cathedral during the evening service I felt that I was being baptised once again. A warmth and love poured over me. The magnificence of the church building and the choir made me feel I was in the presence of the power and beauty of the universe. The love that is there.’ I met a Native American, a Navajo. He was interested in the cathedral’s monastic history. He asked where the monks held their meetings and told me that the Navajos call their meeting-places ‘Chapter Houses.’ I showed him ours, which impressed him and he asked if he could say a prayer. Later he joined us in the Shrine Prayers which he said formed the high point of his visit not only to Durham but to England. In a more minor key, one visitor described the Cathedral’s ‘melancholic majesty’. Of the thousands of entries in the Visitors’ book, the half dozen or so that are not positive relate to disappointed expectations either because access was restricted during a service (one visitor complained, ‘Why do you have services on a Sunday, it’s the best day for visiting?’) or because photography is not permitted. A woman in a pilgrimage group said that when visiting years earlier she took one look at the massive pillars, felt the place was built to keep God out and had to leave. She said this time was quite different and she felt very near to God in Cuthbert’s shrine. Her two different responses suggest

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that a person’s response to the Cathedral is not entirely down to the Cathedral but involves their life circumstances at the time. Mystical experience is not entirely from beyond ourselves; in an incarnational faith it incorporates our humanity, our particularity, into the life of the Trinitarian God. Anecdotal evidence suggests some people who come to the Cathedral when feeling vulnerable may be more susceptible to encounter with God, but, conversely, this could close them to such experience because they have drawn a protective shield around themselves. Some people hear a voice from God speaking to them or a clear but unexpected sense of calling to a new vocation while here. A Roman Catholic Benedictine Abbot locates his vocation to monastic life as occurring when, aged thirteen, he was transfixed by Vespers in the Cathedral, while an Anglican priest said, ‘Durham Cathedral was where I received my call to ordained ministry. In fact both my wife and I discerned God saying this to us both, at the same time, in the same spot, independently of each other.’ The wife of a former vicar of a parish church in Durham told us, A young woman turned up at the Vicarage and told my husband of when she previously visited Durham as a tourist. She was not a Christian and had never heard of the Northern Saints. When passing Bede’s tomb she thought she heard a voice saying, ‘I want you.’ There was no one there. She bought a guide book and returned to America. When she presented herself on our doorstep she was an ordinand. She put down her conversion to the voice she heard in Durham. A joy and frustration of cathedral ministry is that thousands of people come here and we never hear their stories. We are a staging post on life journeys which began and end elsewhere. We have to be content not to know, trusting that what God awakens here will bear fruit in due season. It can be tantalising. People often mention the sense of ‘something beyond themselves’ in the Cathedral. I met a male nurse from London who came in for a couple of hours while his passport application was processed.7 He said he had no religion but being in the Cathedral made him think about life and its purpose. We had a long conversation about God, faith, religious practice and the need he now felt to think about things he had previously avoided. There is no doubt that the ‘Holy Place’ makes a considerable impression upon many people. We welcome many people of other faiths who say they recognise the Cathedral as sacred space and feel welcome. The sanctuary ring which all visitors pass on the north door is not without meaning today: on the day after the London bombings an extended Moslem family came to the Cathedral for the two minutes silence because, amidst the knee-jerk anti-Moslem reaction in the press, they felt it was a safe place to be.

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The shrines Within the Cathedral there are two shrines: the Feretory, the Shrine of St Cuthbert, and the Venerable Bede’s tomb in the Galilee Chapel. Cuthbert is deeply loved and many local people visit regularly; some talk about ‘going to have a word with Cuddy’ or, as one Australian visitor wrote, ‘Cuthbert’s a mate’. We have stories about what happens to people praying in the Feretory but few about Bede. Does association with the much-loved saint raise expectations? Is it the very different ambience of the Feretory, which is enclosed and entered via steps, from Bede’s more public tomb? Probably it is a combination of factors. Stories from Cuthbert’s shrine include these, the first being notable for the detail still remembered, I found I had cancer shortly after both my mother and aunt died; this was 22 years ago when chances of recovery were bleak.  Shortly after I learnt the awful  news I sat in the Feretory  quietly. There were few people around and I seemed to have a conversation about my news with St. Cuthbert. I felt a warm glow around me and a slight weight on my shoulder. It was very reassuring. I believed at the time he would care. I am still here. Every time I steward I believe he listens. An African High Commissioner said that she was not familiar with shrines but was overwhelmed by the presence of God in the Feretory. A lady said that when she was first married she and her husband were unable to conceive. One day she went to the Feretory and prayed for St Cuthbert to help her. ‘I must go now and thank him’ she said, ‘because I am here today to see my daughter graduate from the University.’ An American priest brought a group of teenagers from her church. It was her third visit. Later she wrote. ‘This time as I stood at St. Cuthbert’s tomb and watched each teen light a candle, I was more deeply moved than ever before. Durham, like Holy Isle, seems to be one of those thin places just made for self-examination and reflection on the goodness of God and all of the wonderful works that He has done.’ I was asked to meet an American family in the Feretory. The wife had previously prayed there for the gift of a son and, like Hannah, promised to bring him back. Here they were, with eleven month old Cuthbert. He had been born with all his organs outside his body and, from the first week of his life, had had numerous major operations. Now he was able to travel they were back in Durham rejoicing. We had a short, moving time of prayer. Four years later they returned and we prayed in the shrine again. Some of my own most numinous moments have been in the Shrine kneeling with Chapter colleagues at the end of a service and pilgrimage to the Feretory. It is, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, an experience of kneeling where prayer has been valid, of the communion of the saints. I can understand how people find they can have a conversation with Cuthbert.

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Worship The Cathedral’s fairly formal and non-participatory worship is catalyst or container for mystical experience. There are at least three services every day which, even when seeming to us almost pedestrian, invariably move people. A card in the pews invites Evensong worshippers to worship simply by being present and letting the choir and clergy lead. People frequently describe feeling God’s presence through the music of choral Evensong and the quiet of said Evening Prayer, the relevance of the prayers, the introductions to the readings and the silences we keep afterwards which give a measured pace. People have had life-changing experiences during Evensong: in recent years at least one person became a committed Christian and others have felt the call to ordination. I love coming to the Cathedral for the space it gives me to think, worship or just ‘be’. I like being part of a bigger worshipping community that carries me when I do not feel much like worshipping. It draws me into deeper faith, even when I feel far away. I attend Evensong. I’m still learning, finding richness in worship and seeing things never spotted before. Worldwide, cathedrals are great houses of prayer and worship; the warm welcoming, spiritual atmosphere of Durham’s strong pillared structure, steadfast on the peninsular, continues to thrill pilgrims and signifies God’s everlasting, unchanging love. The cathedral is important as Sunday morning Eucharist is the only time we have together to spend in peaceful contemplation and prayer. The cathedral is a sanctuary from the pace of modern life. The cathedral is at its best when filled with music. Even simply overhearing the choir practice before Evensong touches people: The ambience and music of the cathedral services help me to appreciate what is best in life. Magnificent. The choir was amazing, truly spiritual. Thank you (Australia) The choir singing added to the lovely atmosphere. Heart-stoppingly beautiful choral concert. Thank you (Lanzarote) Wonderful as a choir was singing, so a very special experience.

Wow! Then there is the ‘Wow’ factor: Wow, love this cathedral (a child) An American tourist walked in looked around and said ‘WOW!’ I commented that lots of people say that and he told me he had wanted to visit since seeing a photo of the cathedral 25 years ago. He was not disappointed.

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A member of the royal family on a private visit had a similar response as we stood at the back of the nave and looked east down the length of the Cathedral. This ‘wow’ experience abruptly stops people in their tracks and momentarily takes them out of themselves. Since people do not pay admission, they have not stopped at a desk, fumbled in their purses and thus changed mental gear to become purchasers of admission. Instead they walk straight into an experience of wonder. It may be the height of the nave, the view to the east, the effect of the light, or the solidity of the nave pillars. Whatever it is, they are suddenly somewhere that has disarmed them. I am reminded of Hopkins’ words, ‘Thou mastering me / God!’ Hopkins goes on to speak of being almost unmade and touched afresh before ‘Over again I feel thy finger and find thee’.8 It may take time to make sense of the experience but for some people, that happens in the Cathedral.

Gaining strength Many people visit the Cathedral specifically seeking strength to face circumstances in their lives: Four years ago my sister took her own life in very traumatic circumstances. In the immediate days of bereavement I found comfort and consolation in the presence of God and, kneeling each day at the shrine of St Cuthbert, in communion with the northern saints. A visitor who does a lot of work with disabled people said she had to come to the Cathedral once a month to recharge her batteries. A year ago I first came to the cathedral hoping desperately to find a God I wasn’t even sure existed. He was there. I’m now a regular worshipper and this has helped me mend a rocky marriage, cope with family illness and support me through mental illness. A man standing under the crossing said ‘It really is amazing’. He was a London policeman whose mother died recently and he was visiting his father near Durham. He said he always took time to come into the Cathedral to refresh his spirit before driving home. I love the pillars in the Cathedral. They speak of permanence in a changing world, of the unshakeable strength of God and his supporting power. Like God, they are utterly dependable, whatever the situation in our private lives or the world around. They show us a God bigger than we can imagine, yet firmly rooted in our lives. They are magnificently inspiring! Some stories come from chaplains who are on duty during the day, loitering with friendly intent and available to talk: A distressed lady approached me and asked ‘Could she talk?’ How she’d landed in the Cathedral was unclear. She lived a long way away and, apart

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from an odd funeral or wedding, never darkened the inside of a church. Neither she nor her sister believed in God. The sister had recently been diagnosed with cancer and had only weeks left to live. What was she, who had somehow landed up in this House of God, to do?! When she stopped talking, a temporary miracle occurred: the midday prayers for peace and justice began, giving me time to offer some prayers of my own. But they were up against a total brick wall: NOTHING. No response at all. Eventually the pulpit prayers finished and I had to face the music. But I didn’t have to. Tears were streaming down her face and she was radiant. ‘I know she’s going to die’ she said ‘but she’s going to be alright.’ I saw her half an hour later at the font and she was still the same! A young man, looking around hesitatingly, asked if there was a chapel for the Forces. I showed him the Durham Light Infantry Chapel. As we walked he said that he needed to prepare for tomorrow. I asked him what was happening tomorrow, and he replied ‘I will be leaving for Afghanistan.’ I promised to remember him in prayer. How wonderful that the Cathedral is open, charging no entry fee, and this young man identified the Cathedral as the place to come to prepare for such a momentous step in his life One hot summer’s evening a family arrived in beach clothes. They had been at the beach when they received some tragic news about a cousin. They got straight in the car to drive here, some twenty miles and not on their route home, because they knew that the Cathedral was where they needed to come. They were not church goers and did not know what to do now they had arrived, so we lit a candle and I put their thoughts into a simple prayer. Amidst profuse thanks, they gave me a very sweaty hug. These visitors were dealing with a crisis. Many bring more persistent needs to the Cathedral and we wonder wryly how much taxpayers’ money we save by being here and defusing situations before they require professional help. More than that, we invite awareness of a spiritual dimension to our lives which may strengthen people’s inner resources. I mentioned to a doctor that I did some stewarding at the Cathedral. She told me that, years ago, facing a personal crisis, she came to Durham and sat quietly towards the back of the nave. It seemed to relieve the pressure of the situation for her. A chaplain asked if she was alright and she said she was content just to sit there. After a while the burden seemed less overwhelming. She said she would always retain a feeling of warmth and gratitude for the Cathedral. Then this story illustrates the power of a picture of the Cathedral: Years ago we invited the head of the English department in a Chinese University to Durham. He had been persecuted and tortured during the

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Cultural Revolution and had never visited England. As we entered the Cathedral, he stopped inside the north door, overcome with emotion, and eventually said ‘I have known about Durham Cathedral all my life but never thought I would see it.’ As we walked around, he provided the commentary and, at the list of priors and bishops in the North Quire Aisle, explained to me the significance of one after another. It was a humbling experience that left me with a deep impression of the power of the building to sustain people through thick and thin.

Memory and meaning The cathedral is a place of memory-making. Some people find themselves caught up in long history or in their own memories which are prompted by being here. History is touching you here. (Poland) Really enjoyed sense of peace linked to history. A beautiful place with a memory. Beautiful building, brings back memories. (Australia) Always feel closer to mother and father when I visit here. Always a pleasure. This cathedral takes you back to roots and shows you what’s really important. (Germany) I carry images and emotions from a building that I find unforgettable. The Cathedral is frequently in the back of my mind when I am not there. Does the experience of being in the cathedral put us more truly in touch with ourselves? Does it make us more truly human by reminding us who we are before God? It is a safe place in which to remember even painful things, having held people’s pain through the centuries. It offers security: a child described it as ‘wrapping its arms around you’ and, years later, exactly the same phrase appeared in the visitors’ book. The Durham Light Infantry Chapel and the Miners’ Memorial hold local identity and memory, particularly of people killed in war or accidents. People pray, love and remember: A small boy came with his mother and grandmother to a volunteer-­ recruitment evening. We offered him an activity bag but he said he wanted to see the Miners’ Memorial where a miner’s pit lamp hangs above a memorial book of miners killed in pit accidents. He spent the whole evening standing quietly there while the adults learned about volunteering. I wondered what was going on: certainly the beautifully written names and ages with the date of death say something profound about every life being valued and having meaning before God. Was he absorbing that? Very impressive, it touches you somewhere especially the tribute to coal miners. (India)

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Making a response: prayer, candles and the Lego® Cathedral The instinct to light a candle in a holy place is very strong. This is evidenced during the Lumiere light festival which takes over Durham every other November. During four evenings, over 150,000 people come through the Cathedral, and many who come simply to see the illuminations undoubtedly find themselves having an inner experience which they express physically by lighting a candle at the votive candle stands. Some ask why people do this and respond readily to the suggestion of making it a prayer for light to shine in the world, their own prayer or remembrance of someone who has died; some reflect silently after placing it. Lighting a candle enables people to respond to what they are experiencing in the Cathedral. Up to 500 are lit every day and we have added candle stands at Cuthbert’s shrine, Bede’s tomb, the Gregory Chapel which is reserved for private prayer, the Pieta and the Lama Sabach’thani sculpture. Benches placed by the latter two very different portrayals of the suffering of Christ allow time for quiet reflection and perhaps bringing personal sorrows and suffering to God. Lighting a candle becomes a response that literally sheds light in a place of reflection and perhaps personal sadness. Much spiritual work that we never know about goes on at the votive candle stands where the prayers people write are offered daily at the Eucharist. I am frequently moved by the pain that people bring with them and the tenacity of their faith. Comments in the Visitors’ book describe why people light a candle: I lit some candles to remember people who I loved who have gone to be with our father. It eased my loss and pain. I prayed for a good and Christfilled life. I feel empowered. Came in for a quick prayer and lit a candle due to the anniversary of father’s death. A truly peaceful feeling as you come in. Stunning – said a prayer for my mom who has terminal cancer and lit a candle and prayed for her in this beautiful inspiring church. Names have been changed in this random sample from one day’s prayers at the candle stands. For Nicola, Mary, my Mam and school exam results, let us pray. We pray for peace of mind and that the future will hold great and wonderful things for Shirley, John and myself and hopefully Mark, Laura and David. XX Lord in the name of your Son Jesus Christ bless my family with love, understanding and forgiveness. Let me be always able to provide food and shelter for family and friends, neighbours and stranger. Bless me and my wife with a healthy child, male or female. Love always.

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Pray for my friend Louise and hope her boyfriend Paul is at peace now. RIP. Dear Lord, please let the Lucy situation sort itself out. If you don’t think it’s best for us to stay friends then let the friendship end peacefully. Give me peace and calm in my worry. In your most powerful name I pray. Amen. Thinking of you Dad. Almost 7 years gone and still can’t get used to the idea. Love you. xxx Hi mum. Hope you are well and the big man is looking after you. Miss you loads. Jane: successful in college application. Deo Gratia. I feel I am on holy ground when I open these prayers which are usually folded at least in two, if not more tightly: I wonder what that tight folding says about this being the secret of the heart offered to God. As this sample shows, they adopt a range of approaches: some address God directly, some ask for prayer, some – in Professor Douglas Davies’ phrase – are ‘RIP direct’, like a Christmas card greeting addressed to family members who have died.9 This category increases around Christmas which is a time for remembering family and friends; significant numbers of prayer requests in Christmas week 2013 were addressed to the dead, saying that they were missed, telling them about family events in the last year or asking them to keep an eye on the living. Many wished them, ‘Merry Christmas’.10 It seems that the Cathedral functions not just as liminal space but as mediating space for the bereaved. Some named many people on one piece of paper as the visitor took time to recall everyone. One widow wrote daily and conversationally to her late husband expressing her loneliness and the importance of the Cathedral in her grieving. Most people leaving these prayers do not speak to a Chaplain or Listener but simply come and do their own business with God in private. We never hear the beginning or end of the story, being just a place to turn a concern into a prayer. For some visitors the Lego® Cathedral, being built outside the Cathedral Shop as a fund raising project, serves a similar function to the candle stands and is part of their spiritual experience. It is a place where they deposit their own stories of the Cathedral and placing a Lego® brick becomes a dedicatory act. People tell the volunteers their stories of the Cathedral as they buy and place a bricks. For some, this has deep meaning as they remember their dead or celebrate a wedding or birthday; some weep or stand in stillness when placing it. Three stories illustrate this. An elderly gentleman, whose Granny came from Durham, said, ‘She’d love this kind of thing so I’m laying all my bricks for her.’ A lady who had laid bricks for her grandchildren returned ‘to lay these bricks for personal reasons’; she then laid three bricks, carefully rubbing and praying over each before kissing it, laying it and saying, ‘Thank you, I’ll see you next month.’ The third is about a lady whose late father, a glazier, once repaired a small section of the Cathedral’s Daily Bread window. She had come to the Cathedral for comfort after her mother’s recent death and,

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having laid bricks before, decided to do so again and found that a window was being constructed: ‘Well I just knew, you know…’ She stopped short, her emotions clear.

Children and the Cathedral The Dean of Durham, speaking of his experience as a toddler being woken by church bells in Düsseldorf, said, I felt obscurely that I was on the brink of some great disclosure, drawn into something I couldn’t articulate, but of what or whom? I glimpsed another world, where what I could see or touch was not there at all. Looking back, it feels like an encounter with what historians of religion call Mysterium tremens et fascinans, “the idea of the holy.”11 Do children today have a similar experience here? Come to the lighting of the Christmas tree or the children’s carol service and you will find a cathedral full of children who respond with wonder to the lights and the music. Thousands visit throughout the year with their families or in school groups. Others come with their school to sing as part of the Chorister Music Outreach and are so touched that they audition as choristers or join our non-auditioned choir, many pestering their initially reluctant parents to allow them to join the choir. Through singing in the cathedral something captivated their imagination and they were determined to be part of it. Children’s varied responses are almost overwhelmingly positive as the Cathedral leaves a mark on these young visitors. The cathedral is so big and children so small, yet it does not daunt them. In addition to the little boy who felt the cathedral wrapped its arms around him, children write: I am 9 and I love it. Cool place, I love it I will come back. Wow! I have never seen enysink like it befor. (sic) Is super fun and also is ginormous. An amazing, homely place. It is amazing and a good place to pray. Children are not afraid let their imagination run riot as they touch and smell. In 1994 one class’s poem about their visit began, ‘Tom Kelly says the wall smells of cherries, Robert says there’s something behind the little door breathing’. Another seasoned young cathedral visitor wrote, Been here loads of time Yet still amazed by it Large stained glass windows Silver candlesticks.

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Another wrote ‘It was big, it was massive, it was good’, while another child focused on other experiences: Door knocker Stain glass window Dark. Stones People who are dead Dark. The windows, embroideries and sculptures engage children whose recall of biblical stories can give adults new insights. A group of inner-city youngsters gathered around Josef Pyrz’s statue of Mary in the Galilee Chapel to discuss the annunciation, telling the guide that the angel told Mary, ‘You’re gonna have a bairn’. Asked how they thought Mary felt, one little boy replied, ‘Bloody scared’ which led to a discussion about how sometimes we feel a bit frightened at what we are asked to do but, like Mary, we can talk to God about it. Telling that story to adult pilgrims has given people permission to admit to their own fears or apprehensions. Children respond to the atmosphere. A nine year old told a guide, ‘My favourite bit was you reading a prayer and candles being lit’. Another wrote ‘My favourite part was in St Cuthbert’s Shrine because it was really quiet. I like quiet. Don’t you?’ then added, ‘It’s weird, in St Cuthbert’s shrine it was warm and St Bede’s shrine was cold but I don’t really care because it was amazing anyway.’ A small boy, perhaps 6 years old, came into the Cathedral. He had been brought two weeks ago and simply loved the Cathedral – and Cuthbert. He had made a card for Cuthbert with a drawing of the Cathedral on the front. Inside he had written, ‘To Cuthbert. I love you Cuthbert. I know that you are buried in the Cathedral. I know you died 109 (sic) years ago. Love from Freddie XXX.’ After a tour I asked the children what they would specially remember and George immediately said, ‘Being with Cuthbert.’ Do children have what might be called a mystical experience while they are here? We have to rely on anecdote but it seems that some do and are drawn back to the Cathedral. One mother wrote, When my children were young, the cathedral was a lifeline. On a wet day going into this place of peace was calming for them and for me. And all the wonderful things to discover: greeting the lions below the pulpit, the ‘jewels’ at the base of the lectern, the mysterious little holes in the floor, candles to light and prayers to offer, statues to stroke. We would emerge restored, a little transformed, and one weary mother deeply grateful. My son adored the cathedral at a young age. I remember one of

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his early visits, taking him in, holding him in my arms near the back and hearing him gasp, audibly, as he looked around. Thereafter, whenever he glimpsed the Cathedral, he would shout out in delight “Breegal, breegal” so for a long time that is what our family called it! A local visitor was with her grandson aged about 12 or 13. He pointed to the Daily Bread window and said how much he loved it. Grandmother said ‘He’s very churchy.’ I asked which church he attended and grandmother butted in and said that he went to a Christian church which was brighter and had more for the young people than the C of E. The boy responded that he liked ‘this’ place better and could they come back. Grandmother agreed to bring him and his sisters later in the week. Some adults find a visit evokes childhood memories. We cannot control the memory of the original experience or what a person does with it, but we can be there years later when people return to the Cathedral and the memory is stirred. Then the welcome we give plays a part in aiding any mystical experience on this subsequent visit which may recall the childhood experience. I first visited the cathedral with my parents in 1947 when bands led processions of Methodists singing ‘We’re marching to Zion, beautiful, beautiful, Zion. We’re marching upward to Zion, The beautiful city of God.’ We began at Magdalen Steps. I was only eight and, seeing the cathedral close-up, thought we had reached Zion. An elderly man at the Shrine said it was his first visit for 41 years. He was deeply moved to be back, being from a village near Durham originally but having spent most of his life in South Wales where his dad was a miner. He said that just before the family took the train to Wales, his dad brought them here to ‘say goodbye’. The Cathedral Sunday School nurtures children from the worshipping community for whom the Cathedral is a home environment. They understand that this is where they belong and I have watched children dancing unselfconsciously in the aisle to the music of the hymns or anthems and then kneel quietly to receive a blessing at the communion rail. Others light a candle each time they come. Occasionally babies test their lungs on the echo but few interrupt the choral music which seems to appeal to them, as does the vastness of the space which causes their eyes to wander upwards. ‘Singing boys’ have been educated here for six centuries. Now joined by girls, the Choristers sing and pray in the Cathedral day in, day out, for several years of their young lives. They talk readily about the experience and love to write prayers for use in worship. I have been a chorister for a year and the Cathedral has had a large impact on me and my family. My younger brother wants to go to Evensong every day.

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I’ve loved my first year in the choir! I particularly enjoyed singing big services like the Eucharist with Kings College Cambridge and singing at the top of the tower. This has been one of the best years of my life. I hope every year is like this. Returning choristers speak fondly of their memories and, in her undergraduate dissertation, Lucinda Murphy (Murphy 2015) interviewed four former Cathedral choristers now in their fifties to eighties. Even the one self-defined as least religious described the Cathedral as a ‘bit like a comfort blanket … you wrap yourself in an atmosphere’ while another, who frequently used the word ‘special’ to describe being in the cathedral, recalled, I felt totally at … peace the whole time I was there. I felt totally safe even though there was nobody else around. Other times I would feel very apprehensive. But you shut the heavy door and it’s a wonderful place to be. That’s spirituality to me. He captures the spiritual feeling that can only be ‘triggered by place’ by carrying a cross in his pocket as ‘a kind of portable portal into that safe spiritual world’. Murphy examines the rites of intensification as former choristers return to the Cathedral and emotions are triggered that transport them back to this rooted identity. She concludes, Ultimately it is impossible … to assess the extent to which each of these individuals identify their nostalgic memories with faith. However, it remains … clear that the character of this particular lifestyle is such that it at least imparts resources for fostering faith. These resources are not external but internal. In experiencing a sacred place, the ex-chorister is already identifying with an important part of his core identity. So it is possible to argue that this connection of sacred place and personal identity represents an indirect, unformulated kind of faith. (Murphy 2015) She suggests that when life circumstances bring ex-choristers back to church, ‘It is nostalgia which creates the momentum capable of fostering faith development and which has the ability to empower them to connect the liturgical role they were initiated into as children to their own developed sense of identity.’ So much of our ministry with children is opening the door to wonder. It will bear its ripe fruit later.

Students The Cathedral and Bishop founded the University in the 1830s and links remains strong. Students matriculate and graduate in the Cathedral so associate

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it with significant rites of passage. Many speak of appreciating the brief moment of transcendence as they take a short cut to lectures. Not only did I spend many hours walking the quiet corners of Durham, but absolutely loved spending time in the Cathedral. Though brought up a Muslim, this did not in any way affect my feelings regarding the spirituality and history of this building. (Trip Advisor) The cathedral has been a key part of my Durham life for the six years I have lived here. During my undergraduate degree it was a real refuge from the stress of work to be in the calm beauty of the cathedral. Spending time there always put everything into perspective for me. The annual Graduate Students’ Open Evening draws students and their families from many countries and faith backgrounds. After an introduction to the Cathedral as a Christian place of worship, people are free to wander and we relax the no-photography rule. Invariably students from Christian, Moslem and Hindu backgrounds ask questions about the faith heritage, some describing it as palpable, while students from the Far East immediately take photographs, usually selfies, placing themselves at the centre of the experience, perhaps unconsciously resisting overtures of transcendence.

Photography Most people do not link photography and the potential for mystical experience in the cathedral. We are not opposed to cameras at the right place and the right time, host photography events and have many beautiful photographs of the Cathedral available for purchase or on the web. Nevertheless, like St Paul’s Cathedral,12 Westminster Abbey and Sacré Coeur, we ask visitors not to take photographs within the church, largely because in a busy cathedral it is intrusive for others. Are we denying people their ‘right’ to take photographs as someone accused us of doing? (Does anyone have such a right?) Another called us ‘un-Christian’ yet few complain and one steward reported this encounter: A couple from Florida asked, ‘One last thing before we go, why can’t you take photographs in the cathedral?’ I said ‘Because it is a place of worship’ and did not have to say anything else. He hugged me and said ‘Bless you, that is just what we wanted to hear.’ He explained that he would love photographs of our beautiful cathedral but was so pleased that it is not allowed; in another cathedral they found cameras obtrusive and spoiled their experience. Lived experience is impossible to photograph; it ceases to be lived. As some spiritual directors who were discussing photography commented, ‘You cannot capture the present moment’13 and it is that experience of encounter in

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the present moment which the cathedral offers if we pay attention.14 Susan Sontag argues that photography is a risk-reducing strategy as people ‘take possession of the space in which they are insecure … the very activity of taking pictures is soothing and assuages general feelings of disorientation’ (Sontag 1979). Since the Cathedral regularly and helpfully disorientates people, is a camera counter-productive to encounter with God, to mystical experience? Visitors’ comments testify that the Cathedral invites attentiveness and unexpected experience of the numinous. When we have a good experience, our instinct is to try to hold onto it. Had Peter had a camera on the mount of Transfiguration, his impulse would probably have been to take a photograph; in its absence, to secure a similar result of fixing the moment, he offered offer to build booths. But his suggestion of capturing it immediately ended it. Instead, he had to take what remained with him back into his daily life where its meaning was discovered day by day over the course of his lifetime. Writing of returning years later to an old haunt, Dan Kiernan observed, The reflections and feelings that filtered through my mind … were far truer than the photos I took when we were there. … I never look at photographs if I want to remember a time I went travelling. The most important parts of any trip – how you felt and what you learned – only seem to collect in your mind many years later. If it was truly important, you’ll remember it. You may not understand why the thing you can remember is valuable when it seemed less crucial at the time, but that realisation will come eventually. (Kiernan 2012) Mystics like Julian teach us that it takes years to reflect on the meaning of significant experiences and the process cannot be rushed. For centuries the Cathedral has been a place for encounter which is engendered not just by the physical building but by the whole atmosphere which the camera cannot capture. Instead it comes between us and what we are photographing, distancing us from it as we record or document rather than experience. The language of ‘taking’ a picture is telling: cameras put us in control; we become spectators observing and assessing a place. When we had a limited number of exposures on a film, we had to pause to compose the picture, looking and paying attention, letting what we observed determine the photograph and then waiting days to have our memory refreshed. Now we point and shoot, keeping on clicking, knowing we can delete unwanted pictures. Holidaying in Portugal, I watched people enter churches, pointing cameras before their eyes could adjust to the dark so they could see the building. Many only saw the church through the lens of the camera or I-pad. They had pictures but no familiarity, no encounter. The selfie unashamedly puts self at the centre of the photo turning the building into mere backdrop. It says ‘Look at me, here.’ To some extent, all photographs say ‘I was here’, which may explain why some people prefer

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their own photos to much better ones available from the Cathedral. This self-­focused consumer attitude is very different from that of artists who spend long hours looking, sketching, painting and interpreting what they see, engaging with it and letting it shape their creative response. More fundamentally, it is contrary to the Cathedral’s raison d’être which is to point us away from ourselves, to God. To place ourselves centre-stage is to miss the point of being here.15

Unlikely mystics: how can the Cathedral respond? Visitor response indicates that more people treasure the feelings engendered by Durham Cathedral than its physicality. Marie Clausen expresses concern that UNESCO’s list of Durham World Heritage Site’s Outstanding Universal Values,16 which are largely related to the physical and historical heritage, barely overlaps with what visitors particularly extol (Clausen 2014).17 I am less worried by this because the physical and historical heritage is the container for, as much as the object of, visitors’ experience. It could be argued that this lack of overlap is an expression of the Cathedral’s successful role in pointing beyond itself, having been built as a shrine for a saint who himself points us to God revealed in Jesus Christ. What can the Cathedral do with all of this? How do we help people who are in the Cathedral for a brief time to reap the harvest of what God is doing in their lives, something of which they may catch a first glimpse while here? The vast majority of the 700,000 people who come through our doors each year are not known to us and we occupy but an hour or two of their lives. It can be a transformative one or two hours because, in the mystery of God, there is encounter with the divine while they are here, whether or not they can express it as such. In his final Eucharist sermon after twelve years as Dean of Durham Cathedral, Michael Sadgrove said, We should not make easy assumptions about God nor think we can ever fully know him or understand his purposes. Perhaps that is what has drawn me into cathedrals for most of my ministry, for these are places where the ‘idea of the holy’, numinous buildings, beautiful liturgy and profound music reach into the soul to help us do justice to the great mysteries of faith. [As a toddler hearing church bells] I felt I stood on the threshold of something awesome, as if what was strange was not only fascinating but even enticing. In retrospect, I think of it as a gift to cherish.18 We can offer a threshold of something awesome, a place where people encounter a living tradition that has been lived faithfully for centuries and which challenges so much of contemporary lifestyles and priorities. In that sense, the Cathedral holds a mirror up to each of us. Maybe our role is to prompt questions and give space for response. Leaflets address questions about

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the Christian faith which may be prompted by being in the Cathedral and chaplains are on hand for anyone wanting to talk, but we have to be humble enough to trust the Cathedral, this prayed-in place, to do its work. So our colourful interpretative panels, which explain aspects of the cathedral’s life, end with a question which invites people to engage. We have discovered how powerful these simple questions can be. They can act as a portal to mystical theology as done by lay people in a liminal place where prayer has been valid, where it is safe to ask questions and listen for unexpected answers. One of our visitors described the cathedral as ‘a quiet place that speaks volumes.’ Our role is to ensure it is speaking God’s good news and to help people to listen; to give them a gift to cherish.

Notes 1 The Cathedral Chapter is the equivalent of the governing body of the Cathedral. 2 Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’ in Philip Larkin: Collected Poems London: Faber and Faber, 2012. 3 Comments are by visitors from the United Kingdom if no country of origin is given. 4 Marie Clausen quotes Eliade’s observation that pilgrimage sites can be perceived by the faithful as a sort of home, a refuge, and Lindsay Jones’ extension of this to art and architecture where there is an identificatory pull that has the character or a homecoming; a reunion with one’s self and one’s past (Clausen 2014, p. 128). 5 Augustine, Confessions X. 27. 6 Marie Clausen ponders ‘whether a cultural heritage scheme can ever function as a framework for making sure a site remains charged with the sacredness and the poetry that allows for the meeting of worlds, the dialogue of histories, to happen’ (Clausen 2014, p. 98). 7 There is a Passport Office in Durham. 8 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. 9 Professor Douglas Davies is collaborating with the Cathedral on ongoing research into the prayers left by visitors at the votive candle stands in the Cathedral. 10 On Christmas Day itself, when this trend was most pronounced, 61 per cent of prayer requests remembered the dead, 37% per centwere addressed to the dead by name and a further 19 per cent sent them direct Christmas greetings. There was another, albeit less pronounced, peak of addressing the dead by name on New Year’s Eve. 11 Michael Sadgrove. On the Seashore of Endless Worlds. Sermon preached at Durham Cathedral, 20 September 2015. www.durhamcathedral.co.uk/ worshipandmusic/sermon-archive 12 St Paul’s Cathedral explains its approach in this way, ‘The combination of camera flashes and groups queuing up to pose for photographs under the dome led us to the conclusion that allowing photography greatly detracts from the spiritual life of the Cathedral and can deeply upset people who have come to this church to worship, pray and escape the bustle of City life. Many people also appreciate the anonymity only such a large church can offer. Our close proximity to both the Central Criminal Court (The Old Bailey) and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, means we regularly welcome people who are in some distress, and it is part of our central mission to offer them a place of peace’ (Information from St Paul’s Cathedral Facebook’ sent to the author on 20th July 2015). 13 In conversation at Durham Cathedral, August 2014.

Unlikely mystics  79 14 Benedict Cumberbatch, playing Hamlet, ‘mused on the destruction of memory and experience in the digital age, pleading with people not to ruin the moment but instead pay attention to “a live performance that you’ll remember, hopefully, in your minds and brings whether it’s good, bad or indifferent, rather than on your phones”’ ( Jones, J. (2015), The Guardian 15 August, p. 7). 15 This ambivalence about the appropriateness of photography in holy places is universal. I am grateful to Professor Robin Coningham, UNESCO Chair in Archaeological Ethics and Practice in Cultural Heritage at Durham University for the information that taking a selfie with a statue of the Buddha is forbidden, as is photography in the temple at Lumbini World Heritage Site, Nepal and some other shrines. 16 The Statement of Outstanding Universal Values of the Durham Cathedral and Castle World Heritage Site refers to both the physical and the intangible heritage of the site, including, specifically, ‘The cultural and religious traditions and historical memories associated with the relics of St Cuthbert and the Venerable Bede and with the continuity of use and ownership over the past millennium.’ The World Heritage Site Management Plan Review (2015) devotes much attention to the intangible heritage of the World Heritage Site, something that has been underplayed in the initial emphasis on the physical fabric of the WHS. 17 Clausen 2014, p. 141. 18 Sadgrove. Ibid.

Bibliography Clausen, Marie. (2014) Sacred Architecture in a Secular Age: Anamnesis of Durham Cathedral. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Cook, Chris. (2010) Finding God in a Holy Place: Explorations of Prayer in Durham Cathedral. London: Continuum. Dandelion, Pink. (2013) Making our Connections’: A Spirituality of Travel. London: SCM Press. Davies, Douglas. (2013) Popular Prayers Written at Durham Cathedral: Contemporary Cameos. Durham: Durham University. de Botton, Alain. (2002) The Art of Travel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Eliade, Mircea. (2001) The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Jones, Lindsay. (2001) The Hermeneutics of Sacred Architecture: Experience, Interpretation, Comparison. Cambridge, MA: Centre for the Study of World Religions. Kiernan, Dan. (2012) The Idle Traveller: The Art of Slow Travel. Basingstoke: AA Publishing. Leigh-Fermor, Patrick. [1957] (2004) A Time to Keep Silence. London: John Murray. Murphy, Lucinda. (2015) The Chorister’s Church: An Initiation of Faith or a Chasm of Sermon Doodles? Durham: Durham University. Sontag, Susan. (1979) On Photography. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

5 The renewal of contemplative traditions New monasticism and quotidian practices Bernadette Flanagan Abstract Why are ‘new expressions’ of contemplative traditions emerging at this particular historical moment? What kind of movement are these new expressions? What is the nature of their appeal? To what particular challenges – imaginative, spiritual, cultural and political – are they providing a response? And what role are they playing in the search for meaning and purpose and a more just society in the present historical moment? Given the wide diversity in origins, influences, styles and aims of these new contemplative expressions, such questions are difficult to answer. To this end, it will be useful to consider the diverse and wide-ranging phenomenon of new contemplative expressions through the lens of two key questions that have emerged in contemporary scholarship on religion. First, in what way can discussions about the ambiguous relationship between ‘spirituality and religion’ help us understand the emergence, appeal and meaning of new contemplative movements? Second, how might the concept of ‘lived religion’ be brought to bear in illuminating some of the characteristic means employed by new contemplative movements in seeking spiritual meaning?

Introduction In this chapter I wish to reflect on the renewal of contemplative traditions that have an appreciation of everyday activities. I will do this first by reviewing the place of everyday practice in the early Christian desert contemplative movement. I will then present a case study – the New Monasticism Movement – as a manifestation of the quotidian emphasis in the lived practice of contemplative traditions today.

Syncletica: quotidian practice and the desert tradition Profound changes in the understanding of holiness in any historical era are often extroverted into the landscape. These changes are usually grounded in shifts in social, political and economic realities. Such realities were particularly important in the birth of a distinctive form of early Christian contemplative practice in the North African desert. The movement of

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committed Christians who understood discipleship in a new way that required migration to secluded settings on the urban margins or the desert were mainly constituted of persons who enjoyed the benefits of the rising wealth of cities. The widely acknowledged founder of the North African ‘exodus-to-the-desert’ movement, St Antony of Egypt (252–356), was reputed to have had a considerable amount of land. This affluence was not sufficient however to satisfy the deeper yearnings of Antony and many others like him, and so a metropolis with an alternative culture grew from the migration to the desert of these seekers – what today might be called, A Contemplative Village. Peter Brown, in his classic work on sexual renunciation in early Christianity, describes well the iconic character of the move to the desert (Brown 1991). Moving out to the uninhabited place set the desert dwellers apart from the busy life of urban Christians. The journey to the secluded place enacted the process of disengagement from the dominant expression of Christian community at that time. It separated spiritual practice from everyday life and interactions. However, the spirituality of the desert movement is not fully captured in the accounts of the deep desert dwellers. Others developed a form of spiritual practice that embraced the silence of remote places and hospitable engagement with the visitors to such places. Amma Syncletica (270–350) is representative of such persons, who were often women (Swan 2001). Drawing closer to a figure like Syncletica who took this journey in fourth century Egypt into a contemplative practice that embraced the challenges of everyday life may illuminate the distinctive character of contemplative practice that embrace the quotidian today. At the outset it needs to be acknowledged that the historical factuality of the life of Syncletica has been contested, and so in referring to her life and work I will build on the scholarship of the Canadian Professor of Antiquities, Kevin Corrigan who has made a strong scholarly case for accepting the reality of her life and her contribution to the early Church (Corrigan 1989). The text of her life was little known until the seventeenth century when there was a general revival of interest in Early Christian literature. An analysis of Syncletica’s life which is entitled The Life and Regimen of the Holy and Blessed Syncletica indicates clearly the recognition accorded to her as a desert mother or amma within the historical emergence of such a spiritual teaching role and secondly, her identification as a desert ascetic by modelling of her life on the literary genre used for such purposes. By placing Syncletica within these two groups the historical significance of her life in the history of holiness movements is established. The life of Syncletica is preserved in Syriac and while more recently it has been falsely attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria (d.373), it is most likely that what we have today is a translation of a Greek original composed between the fifth and ninth centuries. Mary Schaeffer’s study of the text of the Life of Syncletica provides an excellent scholarly account of the form and structure of the text, as well as the influences which are evident in it from surrounding theological, biblical and spiritual writers and teachers (Schaffer 2001).

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As with many of the other iconic figures of the fourth century, whose teaching is still available to us today, a second source for accessing the wisdom of Amma Syncletica is the collection of aphorisms which in Greek are called Apophthegmata. In this collection of brief wisdom teachings from what is regularly referred to as the ‘127 desert fathers’, she is actually one of the three women in the collection; the other two being Amma Theodora and Amma Sarah. Amma Syncletica grew up in the city of Alexandria in Egypt. She was rich, well educated, and interested in spiritual teachings from early in her life. She resisted her parent’s encouragement to get married. After the death of her parents, she sold all that she had, distributed the funds to the poor and moved, with her blind sister, from her parent’s home to the vicinity of the family tomb on the outskirts of Alexandria (Goehring 1993). While this choice of dwelling place may sound strange, it is worth remembering that to this day another Egyptian city, Cairo, has a ‘City of the Dead’ which shelters an undetermined number of people that struggle to live among 5.5 square miles of tombs. The tombs that we refer to here were often built like little houses. They provide burial chambers for up to four people in the basement, which has an external entry. The tomb dwellers lived at ground level over the burial chambers. In such a necropolis women commonly took jobs as ‘tomb keepers’. Part of their role included making sure that mourning families had all the necessary supports – both practical and spiritual – to carry out the internment process. For this service the tomb keepers received voluntary donations, which provided their livelihood. To this day women who are disabled, divorced or widowed survive through the provision of services in tomb cities. In moving to such a location Syncletica is embodying a path to holiness which involves the provision of local spiritual care to women who are amongst the most marginalised and impoverished in the society of her day. Not for her a private devotional journey; she embraced the path to holiness through pitching her tent, as Jesus did, among the poor and voiceless. She is a prototypical character for the contemplative practitioner / teacher immersed in daily service which continues to manifest itself in such iconic figures as Dorothy Day (1897–1980); Catherine de Hueck Doherty (1896–1985), Eva Jellett (1868−1958) and Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910−1997).

New monasticism The first case study of the contemporary integration of daily life practice with a contemplative commitment, in the spirit of Syncletica, turns the spotlight on the complex and wide-ranging phenomenon known as ‘new monasticism’. At the outset it must be acknowledged that it is not easy to delineate precisely the phenomenon of new monasticism. Also, the reasons why it is emerging and growing at this particular historical moment are quite diverse in different cultural settings. And while the nature of new monasticism’s appeal is multi-faceted, a review of the mission statements of most of its diverse

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forms will reveal that as a contemplative renewal movement, it is also strongly associated with a spirituality that is embedded in quotidian realities – work, family, travel, gardening, etc. A typical example of a mission statement is the ‘Monk Manifesto’. This was created for the online new monastic community Abbey of the Arts. The leaders of this community: Christine Valters Paintner, the online Abbess; John Valters Paintner, the online Prior live in Ireland; and guide the community in collaboration with a Wisdom Council.1 For this group its ‘Monk Manifesto’ gives an account of the public expression of a member’s commitment to engage in a compassionate, contemplative, and creative life in daily circumstances. Some of the commitments that are embraced by these online monks include finding moments each day for silence and solitude so as to be alert to a deeper wisdom and resist the dominant culture of noise and constant stimulation. Members seek to engage in radical acts of hospitality by welcoming the stranger both without and within. They aim to cultivate community by finding soul friends with whom it is possible to share deepest longings, as well as mentors who offer guidance and wisdom for the contemplative journey. Members also commit to nurturing awareness of kinship with creation and exercising a healthy asceticism by discerning the use of energy and consumables with a view to letting go of what does not help nature to flourish. They aim to be fully present to the work whether paid or unpaid by holding a heart of gratitude for the ability to express one’s gifts in the world in meaningful ways. These commitments are underpinned by embracing a rhythm of rest and renewal through the regular practice of Sabbath and by resisting a culture of busyness that measures a person’s worth by what a person does.

Background inspiration to new monasticism Although a wide range of influences may be discerned in the writings, manifestos and prayer resources of Christian new monastic communities there are certain commonalities regarding their foundational inspiration. Four key figures seem to have anticipated and / or influenced the emergence of new monasticisms and have each been profoundly inspirational: Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945), George MacLeod (1895–1991), Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) and Thomas Merton (1915–1968). Among these figures, the most important source for the linguistic expression ‘new monasticism’ has been from the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) in his book The Cost of Discipleship (Bonhoeffer 1959). Prior to this book, Bonhoeffer had expressed his conviction that authentic Christian living required uncompromising integrity in the face of a vastly changed socio-political environment. This insight arose for him from the unique challenges he encountered in living Christianity under the political oppression of the Third Reich. In a letter to his brother Karl-Friedrich in 1935 he asserted: ‘The restoration of the church must surely come only from a new type of monasticism…. I think it is time to gather people together to do this’ (de Grouchy 1997, 48). When he became director of a seminary

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for the Confessing Church, which was founded to oppose the collusion of the official German Protestant churches with Nazism, Bonhoeffer had the opportunity to work out his new monastic vision concretely with six ordinands. At the heart of this monasticism was solidarity with those who were voiceless and suffering. One biographer of Bonhoeffer (Williams 2014) has pointed out that when Bonhoeffer was speaking in New York, he chose to worship in Harlem, rather than the more affluent churches of Manhattan. In his earlier life Bonhoeffer had spent a significant amount of time in Harlem while he was a postdoctoral student in America at Union Theological Seminary during the 1930–1931 school year. Bonhoeffer also became a lay leader at Abyssinian Baptist Church. Being in the midst of a struggling community brought him close to the scenes of the Gospel. For this biographer – Robert Coles – the essence of Bonhoeffer’s spirituality is not in his books or sermons, but rather in the life choices he made (Coles 1988). Synchronised with the awakening of Bonhoeffer were the efforts of George McLeod, who is acknowledged as the founder in 1938 of the Iona Community on the isle of Iona off the west coast of Scotland. MacLeod was a Church of Scotland pastor who organised out-of-work stonemasons and carpenters in Glasgow to rebuild the abbey on the island of Iona. His dream was to close the gap between work and worship by integrating a busy, active life with a rhythm of awareness of God at work in all dimensions of daily involvement, a vision which has deep roots in the Celtic tradition that are at the heart of the historical legacy of Iona. In a Roman Catholic context, the Jesuit priest, Pierre Teilhard De Chardin, saw the future of religion as a rapprochement between human life as lived within monastic settings and human life lived outside of monastery walls. This vision is embedded in his wider cosmic evolutionary vision. In his 1927 work Le Milieu Divin (The Divine Milieu) he intuited that a time was coming when ‘there will be little to separate life in the cloister from life in the world’ (de Chardin 1978, 1.5.A 67). Similarly, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton anticipated in his own spiritual consciousness some of the changes that are currently being witnessed in the birth of new monasticisms. Merton uniquely captures the shift in spiritual consciousness involved in the development of new monasticism in a notable account of his own awakening, described in his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Merton 1989). Here Merton compares the unexpected illumination of his insight as ‘waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness’.2 It seemed clear to him then that the monastic spirit would in the future flourish both within and beyond its classical walls.

Categories of new monasticism3 The synchronic intuitions of Bonhoeffer, MacLeod, de Chardin and Merton have served as important texts of inspirations for what is variously called

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the ‘new monasticism’, ‘monasticism without walls’, ‘invisible monasticism’, ‘portable monasticism’, ‘secular monasticism’, ‘lay monasticism’ or ‘everyday monasticism’. As these different descriptors make clear, new monasticism as a movement is not a coherent, unified project akin to the manner in which the Trappist monk Thomas Keating has developed Contemplative Outreach4; rather it operates in a free-flowing manner, and any particular form or expression is usually quite localised. Because of this, the work of describing and analyzing the stages of its unfolding, as well as distilling the essence of the forms and types of expressions of this new spiritual vision remains immensely challenging. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify three broad types of new monasticism (based on the sources on which they draw, rather than the era / wave to which they belong): I name these types as Conceptual, Classical and Contextual new monasticism. First, Conceptual New Monasticism encompasses those groups who develop rules for contemplative Gospel living under the influence of some of the seminal thinkers named above. This category therefore includes those people who personally came under the influence of Thomas Merton such as Dorothy Day, foundress of the Catholic Worker Movement, and Catherine de Hueck Doherty, foundress of Friendship House in New York and Madonna House in Canada. They both belong to the group of new monastics who have sought to bring a naked presence to God – which is characteristic of monasticism – alive in the circumstances of social poverty and alienation. New monastic expressions which have been influenced by Bonhoeffer also belong in this cluster. The Northumbria community, which has its community hub in North East England and was founded in 1985, aligns the community story with Bonhoeffer’s vision on its website,5 as well as with Celtic monastic history. The influence of Bonhoeffer is also evident in the Community of the Transfiguration – which was established in 1965 at Roslin, near Edinburgh by Roland Walls (Miller 2014). The element of protest against ever-changing dangerous social trends such as busyness and consumerism is strong in these groups. New monasticism clusters within the Protestant evangelical tradition – many of which are having a global impact – may also be located within this conceptual category. In the writings of these groups the influence of the Scottish moral philosopher, Alasdair MacIntyre is regularly acknowledged. MacIntyre’s ethical writings articulated a politics that provided a framework for communities of people who aspired to sustain a way of life, based on traditions of virtue-living, in the midst of the corrosive effects of ultra-liberalism (MacIntyre 1981). Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and his wife, Leah are representative of the type of people who have founded communities with such a spirituality. Shortly before the United States began bombing Iraq in 2003 this young couple travelled to Iraq as members of a Christian Peacemaker Team,6 determined to witness to the Iraqi people that not all American Christians supported the war. Their experiences became the subject of a book entitled To Baghdad and Beyond (Wilson-Hartgrove 2005). In this book they tell the

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story of their ultimate conversion to the lived reality of ‘new monasticism’ when they experienced extended hospitality in the village of Rutba in Iraq after the jeep in which they were travelling had an accident. On their return home they set about establishing Rutba House, a local neighbourhood community of hospitality that prays, eats, and lives monastic hospitality and spirituality in the setting of a family home. In the second category, Classical New Monasticism, classical monastic rules as articulated by such groups as the Benedictine, Basilian and Cistercian traditions are translated into new life circumstances. The initiative ‘Monasteries of the Heart’,7 for example, was begun in April 2011 by the Benedictine Sisters of Erie, Pennsylvania. It is rooted in the conviction that the Benedictine Rule can support the growing quest for spiritual community in the West today. ­Susan Stevenot Sullivan is a lay Cistercian who has reflected on how the Reign of God may be in a new stage of establishment through the diversity of people being called to embed the detachment of monastic spirituality in lives that are increasingly under consumerist pressures (Stevenot-Sullivan 1999). Janet ­Buchanan, an associate of the Methodist Benedictine monastery of St. Brigid of Kildare in Minnesota, has collated her extensive research of groups applying the Rule of Benedict to daily life, under the title Monks Beyond Monastery Walls: Benedictine Oblation and the Future of Benedictine Spirituality (Buchanan 1999). An article by the Welsh spirituality scholar, Esther de Waal, which is entitled, ‘Living with a Monastic Heart’ gives typical voice to how the new monasticism of this variety involves living the classical spirituality of monastic life in daily life settings. In De Waal’s case it is the Benedictine Rule which shaped her married life. She says: It (The Rule of Benedict) spoke to me of things I have struggled with in my own life: how to hold a family together because a family and a community have got so much in common; how to handle the ordinary things in life and make these a way to God; …how to keep the open door of hospitality and a warm welcome to everyone who comes, without allowing myself to be exhausted by the constant pressure of people. And in all of this how to find time and space for prayer while living a very ordinary, practical, day-to-day life. (deWaal 2006) Contextual New Monasticism is a third category of new monasticism. It includes groups for whom a new expression of monastic commitments is an effort to bring Gospel-based values into dialogue with the hopes and anxieties of people in a contemporary global context. World War Two, for example, provided a context for new experimentation with monastic spirituality. Brother Roger (1915–2005) who sowed the seeds of Taizé, and Chiara Lubich (1920–2008) who founded Focolare, both established their communities of reconciliation and inclusion within an environment of war, distrust, religious intolerance and violence.

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Other new monastic groups have embraced the artistic turn in contemporary culture as a key resource in nurturing contemplative consciousness. This expression has a tangible manifestation in the work of Christine Valters Paintner who has developed the previously referenced online monastery, Abbey of the Arts. Similarly, Ian Adams, the founder of mayBe community8 in Oxford, has communicated his new monastic vision in poetry, art, photography and music (Adams 2010). Included in this category of new monasticism are those initiatives which seek to give expression to monastic spirituality among the most socially abandoned, such as prisoners. At Kumla – which is in central Sweden and the location of one of Sweden’s three high-security prisons – there is a special division called ‘The Monastery’. This space was opened in 2003 by a Lutheran Minister and a Jesuit priest. At The Monastery prisoners may participate in a silent retreat in the Ignatian tradition. The aim of this Monastery project is to facilitate prisoners gaining the courage to let go of acquired identities in the criminal world and to dare to see both themselves and reality clearly (Sizoo 2004, 2010). Finally, this category embraces a cluster of expressions of new monasticism which reflect emerging new frontiers in contemplative consciousness such as eco-spiritualty and inter-spirituality. In the former category, an initiative such as Green Mountain Monastery 9 identifies itself as the sixth major epochal expression of monasticism – Desert, Community, Mendicant, Intellectual, Activist, Planetary / Cosmological – and as such a necessary and fundamental development in monasticism’s spirituality for this time of ecological concern. In the inter-spiritual variety of new monasticism, the foundations of community are built on the contemplative wisdom of multiple religious traditions. A significant figure for this form of new expression of monasticism is Wayne Teasdale (Teasdale 1999, 2002), who used the image of the ‘mystic heart’ to capture his vision. In this image Teasdale has emphasised that the encounters between religions today must, for the wellbeing of humanity, go beyond an intellectual connection to one where the direct mystical experience of reality is known together. An inter-spiritual vision of new monasticism also inspires the work of Rory McEntee and Adam Bucko, as expressed in The Foundation for New Monasticism. They aim to bring the new monastic vision onto campuses through cultivating an inter-spiritual contemplative fellowship for college students under the name of the Hebrew word ‘HAB’ as well as establishing an expression of the Bede Griffth vision in the West (Bucko and McEntee 2015).

Interpreting the turn to quotidian spirituality in new monasticism All of the above raises the question: What background influences are feeding into this turn to quotidian spirituality in new monasticism? The response

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to this will vary between Christian communities, but below I will look at Roman Catholic commentary and teaching which is influential. Developments in the metaphorical significance of the monk icon for capturing a contemplative turn in some sections of contemporary culture resonate with some themes in recent Catholic writings. The ‘universal call to holiness’ was a particularly special insight of the Second Vatican Council; it is taken up expressly in Chapter 5 of the 1964 document Lumen gentium, the dogmatic constitution on the Church. In spite of the teachings and examples of many great lay saints, it was still commonplace in the early twentieth century to consider holiness the exclusive domain of those with vowed membership of a religious institute. Also, the 1965 Vatican Council document Ad Gentes, the decree on the missionary activity of the Church, encouraged those in the established forms of life focused on the spiritual journey (i.e. consecrated life groups), to look outwards and to engage with the ascetical and contemplative practices of lifelong practitioners (in other words, monks) in the great religious traditions of the world and to ‘reflect attentively on how Christian religious life might be able to assimilate the ascetic and contemplative traditions, whose seeds were sometimes planted by God in ancient cultures’ (Ad Gentes, §18). Fourteen year later, on 26 September 1979, St John Paul II, in an address to a delegation of representatives of the traditional schools of Buddhism in Japan, showed a particular concern for cultivating understanding across and between religious traditions in a monastic context. He said to the gathered Buddhists, I congratulate those among you who have lived in small groups in the great Christian monasteries and have shared fully their life of prayer and work for three weeks. Your experience is truly an epoch-making event in the history of inter-religious dialogue.10 Seven years later, on 27 October 1986, his unique address in Assisi to the representatives of the Christian Churches and to leaders of new ecclesial communities and to delegates of the world religions highlighted how it was the concrete historical expressions of the monk archetype found in Francis and Clare of Assisi that could act as a beacon of the gift of monasticism for today: May this holy man and this holy woman inspire all people today to have the same strength of character and love of God and neighbour to continue on the path we must walk together. Moved by the example of Saint Francis and Saint Clare … we commit ourselves to re-examine our consciences, to hear its voice more faithfully, to purify our spirits from prejudice, anger, enmity, jealousy and envy. We will seek to be peacemakers in thought and deed, with mind and heart fixed on the unity of the human family.11 In other words, the spirituality of Francis and Clare is a resource for all walks of life and for all people.

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In the light of the developments outlined above it makes sense that in his Apostolic Letter on the occasion of the arrival of the new millennium, Novo Millennio Ineunte, he attached particular importance to another element of monastic spirituality: its capacity to open up a space within society for likehearted contemplative seekers. Monastic spirituality supports companionship in the spiritual journey and operates within the horizon of a ‘spirituality of communion’, that is a spirituality of closeness, ‘being with’, ‘being amidst’ others on the journey into God: Paragraph 43 of Novo Millennio Ineunte states that: To make the Christian community the home and the school of communion: that is the great challenge facing us in the millennium which is now beginning, if we wish to be faithful to the Jesus of the Gospels and respond to the world’s deepest yearnings. Like-spirited contemplative seekers will now bring to bear in their diverse settings the heart of one present in compassion to all of life. Presence is a complex concept. To cultivate the art of presence to this degree is a great challenge. The word ‘presence’ is derived from Latin praesen, which consists of the words prae, meaning ‘in front’, and sens, meaning ‘being’; i.e. the ability live with awakened sensibilities to the unique beings who cross our paths / pass in front of us, in so many ways and places. An experience of the deep reality of the full and total presence of another to our human condition can be profoundly transformative. The Israelites in their Exodus journey were reassured and encouraged by the sense of Divine presence: ‘My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest’ (Ex 33:14). Today nursing scholarship has given great attention to the therapeutic power of authentic nurse-­presence when it is made available to patients. This scholarship views therapeutic presence as an inter-subjective encounter between a nurse and a patient in which the nurse encounters the patient as a unique human being in a unique situation and in which a nurse chooses to be fully attentive to that person (Chase et al. 1997). The cultivation of awakened personal presence can have profound outcomes. When an encounter is underpinned by an active, lived presence, its impact can be of exceptionally long duration; the encounter may even reverberate during the whole of a lifetime. It can result in a sense of connectedness with the person encountered, which is not dependent on any prior knowledge of the person. Becoming present to reality is energizing; when an encounter is suffused with presence, those involved may experience a physical, emotional and spiritual surge of energy, even in spite of whatever challenging circumstances may surround the encounter – poverty, hunger, grief, homelessness, etc. Feelings of isolation or abandonment may be overcome, even after the physical presence ceases. The experience of presence in an encounter can enhance self-esteem and empower an individual to find their voice (Pettigrew 1990). The transformative power of Presence is at the heart of the message of the Year of Mercy called by Pope Francis in 2015: ‘In this era of profound changes, the Church is called to offer her particular contribution, rendering visible the signs of the presence and closeness of God’.12

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Quotidian spirituality-influential teachers Finally I wish to turn to some writings on spiritual practice which are shaping the quotidian emphasis in the practices of new monastic spiritualities. A deeper appreciation of Jesus’ own daily spiritual journey has come to the fore as a central theme in many contemporary spirituality authors. The Augustinian contemplative teacher Martin Laird has helpfully presented the historical precedents for this appreciation. He has highlighted how the fourth-century outstanding Christian teacher Evagrius (b.345 in Turkey; d.399 in Egypt), in line with the contemplative school in which he practiced, interpreted the temptation of Jesus in the desert, not as abstract teaching about power and lust but, as a teaching about the use of short scripture phrases ‘in order to break the cycle of inner chatter that would only hold his attention captive the more he listened to it and indulged it’ (Laird 2011, 13). Thus Laird invites readers to approach the Gospels with a view to learning how to live with the Wisdom of Jesus in daily life by putting on his mind (Phil 2:5). The challenge for Christians is not ‘just admiring Jesus, but acquiring his contemplative consciousness’ (Bourgeault 2008, 29). The Camaldolese monk, Bruno Barnhart (1931–2015), also asserted that one of the challenges that Western Christianity must face today is that it has given more attention to moral conversion than to the revolution in consciousness which an encounter with Christ initiates (Barnhart 1999, 51). Contemporary theologians have also provided a multitude of insights into the emergent contemplative turn in everyday circumstances. The German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner (1904–1984) highlighted the struggle in today’s spiritual practitioners to re-integrate mysticism and prophetic action. In his 1963 book Visions and Prophecies Rahner noted: It can be said with but little exaggeration that the history of mystical theology is a history of the devaluation of the prophetic element in favour of non-prophetic, ‘pure’, infused contemplation. …Nevertheless prophecy has its foundation in Scripture, and in practice has a great history in the Church … yet … theology has never paid any serious attention to the question of whether there are prophets even in post-apostolic times, how their spirit can be recognized and discerned … what (is) the importance of their mission for the exterior and inner life of the church? (Rahner 1963, 20ff ) Dorothee Soelle (1929–2003) made Rahner’s insight more concrete when she defined mysticism not as a new vision of God, but as a different relationship with the world – one that has borrowed the eyes of God (Soelle 2001, 292f ). Sarah Coakley has also been a strong contemporary advocate of the power of a commitment to nurturing contemplative attentiveness for activating social compassion: The moral and epistemic stripping that is endemic to the act of contemplation is a vital key here: its practical self-emptying inculcates an

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attentiveness that is beyond merely good political intentions. Its practice is more discomforting, more destabilizing to settled presumptions, than a simple design on empathy. (Coakley 2009, 6ff ) Matthew Eggemeier has observed (Eggemeier 2012, 55) that Coakley’s assertion of the socio-political fall-out from the cultivation of contemplative attentiveness reflects a strong influence from the French philosopher, mystic, and political activist Simone Weil (1909–1943). For Weil the self could most effectively be dispossessed of its insular focus by entering into the practice of opening to God in contemplative attentiveness. In opening to God, the self is de-centred in a manner which prepares it for de-centering in the context of the suffering of the world, in whatever form this presents itself (Weil 2001). Similarly, the vibrant Jewish woman who lived in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the early 1940s, Etty Hillesum (1914–1943), who like Weil was a victim of the Holocaust, embraced the practice of solitude so as to expand the space within herself to receive and transform the suffering of the world in which she was immersed: There is always a quiet room in some corner of our being, and we can always retire there for a while. Surely they can’t rob us of that. For a whole year now I have been working at that quiet space within me, so that it has now expanded into a great hall, palpably present. (Hillesum 2002, 473f ) Honoring a deep longing to know intuitively the deep mystery at the heart of our being and consciously choosing the path of kindness and compassion in daily life are no longer oppositional drawings.

Conclusion New monastic communities bear witness to the myriad ways it is possible to embrace classic monastic ideas and practices (contemplative prayer, ways of living in community and embodied spiritual practices such as fasting and silence) while also reimagining and recasting them to give shape to a new, authentic and sometimes-prophetic life practice in quotidian circumstances. These communities also bear witness against the acceleration and mindless activism which is endemic in contemporary culture. One popular fable bears witness to this protest movement, The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari: A Fable about Fulfilling your Dreams and Reaching your Destiny by Robert Sharma (Sharma 1997). My attention had been drawn to the book by the large numbers who signed up for a seminar by the author in Dublin in March 2008. The book tells the fictional story of a man called Julian Mantle. He is an invincible lawyer in the courtroom, but taking hold of his own personal life is defeating him. His various addictions eventually lead him to having an almost fatal

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heart attack in a packed courtroom. His physical collapse brings on a spiritual crisis that forces him to confront the condition of his life and to ask deeper questions about the ultimate meaning of become wealthier and more famous. Hoping to find answers to his new questions, he embarks upon an eventful journey in India, where he meets some spiritual guides who help him learn how to live with gratitude for the small gifts of every day. The tale presents, in a modern form, the Gospel invitation to quotidian gratefulness: ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’. (Matt. 6:28–29).

Notes 1 See http://abbeyofthearts.com. 2 The intersection of Fourth and Walnut Streets is now Fourth and Muhammad Ali Boulevard. A previous version of this experience was recorded by Merton in his private journal on March 19, 1958, the day after his fateful visit to Louisville and the seventeenth anniversary of his taking the vows of the Trappist order. 3 In my previous discussion of new monasticism, I identified chronological ­categories. I believe the typological categories identified provide a more coherent account of the sources of this movement (Flanagan 2014). 4 See www.contemplativeoutreach.org. 5 See www.northumbriacommunity.org. 6 See www.cpt.org. 7 See www.monasteriesoftheheart.org. 8 See http://maybe.org.uk. 9 See www.greenmountainmonastery.org. 10 See www.fjp2.com/us/john-paul-ii/online-library/audiences/4080-generalaudience-september-26-1979. 11 See www.santegidio.org/it/ecumenismo/uer/1986/papa.htm. 12 Pope Francis, GENERAL AUDIENCE, Wednesday, 9 December 2015, ‘Why have a Jubilee Year of Mercy’, https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/­ audiences/2015/documents/papa-francesco_20151209_udienza-generale.html.

Bibliography Adams, Ian. (2010) Cave, Refectory, Road: Monastic Rhythms for Contemporary Living. Norwich: Canterbury Press. Barnhart, Bruno. (1999) Second Simplicity: The Inner Shape of Christianity. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist. Barnhart, Bruno. (2007) The Future of Wisdom: Toward a Rebirth of Sapiential Christianity. New York: Continuum. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. (1959). The Cost of Discipleship. Trans. R.H. Fuller, rev. ed. New York: Macmillan. First published in 1937 as Nachfolge. Bourgeault, Cynthia. (2008) The Wisdom Jesus: Transforming Heart and Mind—A New Perspective on Christ and His Message. Boston: Shambhala. Brown, Peter. (1988) The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press. Buchanan, Janet. (1999). Monks Beyond Monastery Walls: Benedictine Oblation and the Future of Benedictine Spirituality. D. Min dissertation: Graduate Theological Foundation, Berkeley, CA.

The renewal of contemplative traditions  93 Chase, Susan, Mary Ellen Doona, and Lois A. Haggerty. (1997). ‘Nursing Presence: An Existential Exploration of the Concept’ Scholarly Inquiry for Nursing Practice: An International Journal 11: 3–14. Chittister, Joan. (2011). The Monastery of the Heart: An Invitation to a Meaning ful Life. London: SPCK. Coakley, Sarah (2009). ‘Is There a Future for Gender and Theology? On Gender, Contemplation and the Systematic Task’ Criterion 7/1: 2–12. Coles, Robert ed. (1988). Bonhoeffer: Writings. Selected with an Introduction. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Corrigan, Kevin. (1989) ‘Syncletica and Macrina: Two Early Lives of Women Saints’ Vox Benedictana 6: 3241–3257. de Chardin, Pierre Teilhard. (1978) The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life. Trans. Bernard Wall. London: Fontana Books. de Gruchy, John W., ed. (1997) Bonhoeffer for a New Day: Theology in a Time of Transition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. de Waal, Esther. (2006) ‘Living with a Monastic Heart’ in M. Whelan, ed., Issues for Church and Society in Australia. The Aquinas Jubilee Lectures. Sydney: St Pauls. Eggemeier, Matthew. (2012) ‘A Mysticism of Open Eyes: Compassion for a Suffering World and the Askesis of Contemplative Prayer’ Spiritus 12/1: 43–62. Flanagan, Bernadette. (2014) Embracing Solitude: Women and New Monasticism. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock. Goehring, James. (1993) ‘The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt’ Journal of Early Christian Studies 1/3: 281–296. Hillesum, Etty. (2002) Etty: The Letters and Diaries of Etty Hillesum 1941–1943. Complete and Unabridged. Ed. K. Smelik. Trans. A Pomerans. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans. Jonveaux, Isabelle, Stefania Palmisano, and Enzo Pace, eds. (2014) Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion. Volume 5: Sociology and Monasticism, Between Innovation and Tradition. Leiden: Brill. Laird, Martin. (2011) A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness and Contemplation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press. McEntee, Rory and Adam Bucko. (2015) The New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Maas, Frans. (2004) ‘Etty Hillesum: “In Me Is the Earth and in Me Is Heaven”’ in Frans Maas, ed., Spirituality as Insight: Mystical Texts and Theological Reflection. Leuven: Peeters, 112–145. Merton, Thomas. (1989) Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. New York: Image Books. Miller, John. (2014) A Simple Life: Roland Walls & The Community of The Transfiguration. Edinburgh: St Andrew’s Press. Palmisano, Stefania. (2016) Exploring New Monastic Communities: The Re(invention) of Tradition. rev. ed. Abingdon: Routledge. Pettigrew, Jan. (1990) ‘Intensive Nursing Care: The Ministry of Presence’ Critical Care Nursing Clinics of North America, 2/3: 503–508. Pseudo-Athanasius. (1996) The Life and Regimen of the Holy and Blessed Syncletica. Trans. Elizabeth Bryson Bongie. Toronto: Peregrina Rahner, Karl. (1963) Vision and Prophecies. Trans. C. Henkey and R. Strachan. New York: Herder.

94  Bernadette Flanagan Schaffer, Mary. (2001) A Study of the Life of Blessed Syncletica. Toronto: Peregrina. Sharma, Robert. (1997) The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari: A Fable about Fulfilling Your Dreams and Reaching Your Destiny. San Francisco and London: Harper Perennial. Sizoo, Lysanne. (2004) ‘When Cell Doors Close and Hearts Open’ The Way 43: 161–168. Sizoo, Lysanne. (2010) ‘Kumla Prison Monastery: Taking the Next Step’ The Way 49: 93–104.Soelle, Dorothee. (2001) The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress. Stevenot Sullivan, Susan. (1999) ‘How Can This Be?: The New Mystery of Monastic Vocation’ Benedictines 26–31. Swan, Laura. (2001) The Forgotten Desert Mothers: Sayings, Lives and Stories of Early Christian Women. New York: Paulist. Teasdale, Wayne. (1999) The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions. Novato, CA: New World Library. Teasdale, Wayne. (2002) A Monk in the World: Cultivating a Spiritual Life. Novato, CA: New World Library. Ward, Benedicta, trans. (1984) The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications. Weil, Simone. (2001) Waiting for God. Trans. Emma Craufurd. New York: Perennial Classics. Williams, Reggie L. (2014) Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance. Waco, TX: University of Baylor Press. Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan. (2005) To Baghdad and Beyond: How I Got Born Again in Babylon. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock.

6 Wittgenstein reads Merton The mystical theology of two twentieth-century masters Peter Tyler

Abstract The chapter explores the work of two twentieth-century writers whose work, it is argued, constitutes a contemporary version of the ancient tradition of mystical theology: the Austrian linguistic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) and the American Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915–1968). Drawing on the works of Wittgenstein’s final creative period, the chapter compares these with the last writings of Merton. It is argued that Merton’s own incomplete understanding of the Austrian philosopher closed him to the possibility of finding some solutions to the final problems that vexed him in the last few years of his life. What emerges from this investigation is a new insight into how two twentieth-century masters of ‘mystical theology’ approached some of the deeper mysteries of human motivation and action.

Introduction Recent scholarly debate has tended to support the notion that after his work on the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) last philosophical thoughts begin to launch out in new directions. This would include not only the second part of the Philosophical Investigations (never prepared systematically by Wittgenstein for publication) as well as the thoughts, writings and aperçus from Wittgenstein’s last few years collected by his literary editors as The Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (LWP), Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (RPP) and the Lectures on Philosophical Psychology (LPP).1 In this chapter I want to concentrate on two aspects of these writings – what he describes as the Aufleuchten eines Aspekts (the ‘dawning of an aspect’) and a general later critique of ‘the inner’ (in mental terms) – and compare the approach to these problems that Wittgenstein adopts to those presented in the last writings of the American Trappist contemplative and social commentator, Thomas Merton (1915–1968). On one level the two writers seem to present different views of mental phenomenology, and in one respect this is correct, as I will demonstrate. However, I will contend that the unavailability of many of the writings of what has been called ‘The Third Wittgenstein’ at the time of Merton’s death in 1968 means that Merton’s own incomplete

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understanding of the Austrian philosopher (as evidenced by his somewhat prickly remarks about him towards the end of one of his last works – Zen and the Birds of Appetite – in 1968) closed him to the possibility of finding some solutions to the final problems that vexed him, the restless contemplative, in the last few years of his life. Conversely, I will argue, that the American contemplative monk (and of course Wittgenstein himself did consider the monastic vocation during his life too) is able to flesh out some aspects of Wittgenstein’s own account of the ‘change of aspect’ by setting the conditions for that very existential change of being that Wittgenstein himself sought so longingly throughout his life. What emerges from this investigation, I contend, is a fascinating insight into how two twentieth-century masters of ‘mystical theology’ approached some of the deeper mysteries of human motivation and action at the sources of contemplation itself.

The siren voices Wittgenstein’s later thought on the process of what he would call ‘aspect-­ seeing’ was particularly stimulated by his prolonged reflection on Jastrow’s famous ‘Duck-Rabbit’ diagram (Figure 6.1). As he lived in virtual isolation at a farmhouse in Rosro near Connemara, Ireland (having resigned his professorship in Cambridge and more or less withdrawn from academic life) there are amusing stories of the great philosopher drawing the diagram in the sand of the sea-shore and then standing there for hours staring at it – much to the bemusement of his fellow villagers. In the final remarks on ‘the philosophy of psychology’ he returns continually to the figure and how an aspect is changed in our thought and life. What fascinated him was how ‘nothing and yet everything’ is changed with the change of aspect. As he wrote in 1948 at Rosro: What is incomprehensible is that nothing, and yet everything, has changed, after all. That is the only way to put it. Surely this way is wrong: It has not changed in one respect, but has in another. There would be nothing strange about that. But ‘Nothing has changed’ means: Although I have no right to change my report about what I saw, since I see the same

Figure 6.1  Duck-Rabbit.

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things now as before – still, I am incomprehensibly compelled to report completely different things, one after the other. (RPP2: 474) As we look at the duck-rabbit, or indeed other parts of our perception of the world, ‘a new aspect’ dawns – everything has changed while nothing has changed. In his prolonged reflection on this phenomenon Wittgenstein is at pains to discount two lines of explanation. The first is what he calls ‘the psychological’. This, he explains, would be to ‘seek causes’ for the change – I would interpret this as perhaps a neurological or reductionist search for the physical causes of the change – either in the firings of neurons or some other aspect of brain structure: Indeed, I confess, nothing seems more possible to me than that people some day will come to the definite opinion that there is no picture/ representation in either the physiological or nervous systems which corresponds to a particular thought, a particular idea or memory. (LWP1: 504, I have adjusted the translation slightly) True to his later growing disillusionment with the universalist claims of such ‘scientism’ he declares that such searching for causes is of no interest to him (LWP 1: 434).2 For as he says himself in the Philosophical Investigations, by ‘giving all these examples I am not aiming at some kind of completeness, some classification of psychological concepts’ (PI: 206e). Having resisted the siren voices of neo-empirical psychology, Wittgenstein then proceeds to turn his guns on what he sees as the other chief distraction in formulating his response to the change of aspect – the lure of inwardness. As he warns: ‘Do not try to analyse the experience in your self ’ (PI: 204e/LWP 1.548).3 ‘Inner pictures’ / Inneren Bilden are ‘misleading, for this concept uses the “outer picture” as a model’ for ‘the use of the words for these concepts are no more like one another than the uses of “numeral” and “number”. (And if one chose to call numbers “ideal numerals”, one might produce a similar confusion)’ (PI 196e/PU 523).4 As I have argued elsewhere (Tyler 2011), I see one of the characteristics of Wittgenstein’s style is the use of ‘shock tactics’ to force his reader to think for themselves. As I wrote in The Return to the Mystical (Tyler 2011), Wittgenstein ‘prods and pokes’ his reader to allow each of us trapped flies to escape our own personal ‘fly-bottles’. Typical of these tactics (common with, I have argued, the great writers of mystical theology such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross) are the use of irony (in Wittgenstein’s case inherited from his master Søren Kierkegaard), exaggeration, paradox and humour. Wittgenstein’s later writings are peppered with many examples of all of these and one of his most startling assertions makes its appearance in his critique of the inner: I can know what someone else is thinking, not what I am thinking. It is correct to say ‘I know what you are thinking’, and wrong to say ‘I know what I am thinking’

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(A whole cloud of philosophy condensed into a drop of grammar). (PI 222e/PU565) To say the change of aspect occurs by the change of an ‘inner picture’ is therefore for Wittgenstein nonsensical – tautological even: The ‘inner’ is a delusion. That is: the whole complex of ideas alluded to by this word is like a painted curtain drawn in front of the scene of the actual word use. (LWP 2:84e) Now, if we begin to turn Wittgenstein’s thoughts here onto the grand tradition of Christian mystical theology we immediately encounter a problem – for the tradition has sometimes been obsessed with the ‘inner’.5 No better example of this can be found than in the later writings of Thomas Merton. The lives of the two men – Wittgenstein and Merton – have striking parallels. Both born into relatively affluent and artistic families they were afforded as young men a certain freedom of education and style that probably contributed more than anything to their fiery independence of spirit and thought. Both in their twenties had a life crisis that propelled them into a complete re-evaluation of all that they had achieved and led to the contemplation of a monastic vocation. In the case of Wittgenstein this was rejected (more by his fellow monks than by Ludwig himself ) and in the case of Merton embraced. Both wrote significant works as young men that shaped the philosophical and theological climates that followed them. In the case of Wittgenstein the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Merton the Seven Storey Mountain, works, incidentally, that both men began to repudiate as they moved into middle age.

The inner Merton The Inner Experience (IE), published in 2003 from the manuscript of Merton’s 1950s revision of his earlier What Is Contemplation (1948), neatly encapsulates Merton’s lifelong attempt to describe the nature of the contemplative life.6 Throughout the text Merton appears to assume the approach to the ‘inner’ as a distinct ‘mental realm’ that Wittgenstein had so forcibly critiqued in his own late writings. Take this passage from the beginning of the text for example: Every deeply spiritual experience, whether religious, moral, or even artistic, tends to have in it something of the presence of the interior self. Only from the inner self does any spiritual experience gain depth, reality, and a certain incommunicability. But the depth of ordinary spiritual experience only gives us a derivative sense of the inner self. It reminds us of the forgotten levels of interiority in our spiritual nature, and of our helplessness to explore them. (IE: 7)

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Now much of the language here is the traditional language of the Christian contemplative (and often mystical) tradition – that is, ‘interiority’, ‘depth’, ‘the inner self ’ and ‘levels of interiority’. As explained above, Wittgenstein was deeply sceptical of such metaphors, not least because he continually asked: ‘Yes, but what do they mean?’ How can we talk of psycho-physical spatial ‘depth’ in the construct of the mental which is essentially non-spatial? Merton is right to point to the ‘certain incommunicability’ that lies in this process for the very concepts of meaning (or in Wittgensteinian terms, ‘the language game’) begin to break down at this point.7 Now if Merton was to simply essay ‘the inner’ as a realm to be ‘mysteriously approached’ through contemplation without intuiting (I use the word here in its Kantian sense) an unease with such language this chapter could finish at this point, we could cheer the wisdom and perception of Wittgenstein and leave the mystical theology of Merton to continue languishing in its dark ‘inner’ prison. But, fortunately for our investigation, what is fascinating in Merton’s late writing (and the editing of the Inner Experience by William Shannon allows us to read the middle-aged Merton critiquing the work of his younger self ) is that Merton himself intuits that the mental language of ‘inner and outer’ simply won’t work as a means of expressing what he has encountered in the contemplative life. These ideas are brought out forcibly in one of his last published works, Zen and the Birds of Appetite (ZB, 1968). In this late work Merton (like Wittgenstein) takes as his target the Cartesian self: Modern man, in so far as he is still Cartesian... is a subject for whom his own self-awareness as a thinking, observing, measuring and estimating ‘self’ is absolutely primary. It is for him the one indubitable ‘reality’ and all truth starts here. The more he is able to develop his consciousness as a subject over against objects, the more he can understand things in their relations to him and one another, the more he can manipulate these objects for his own interests, but also, at the same time, the more he tends to isolate himself in his own subjective person, to become a detached observer cut off from everything else in a kind of impenetrable alienated and transparent bubble which contains all reality in the form of purely subjective experience. (ZB: 22) Modern consciousness, for Merton, becomes ‘an ego-self imprisoned in its own consciousness, isolated and out of touch with other such selves in so far as they are all “things” rather than persons’ (ZB: 22). So our two authors, then, share a common unease over the developing of the subject-object duality of the post-Cartesian Western empirico-scientific mindset. However, the two authors do differ somewhat in their solutions to this problem. Wittgenstein prefers to lay the problem before us and give us his unendingly curious, frustrating and infuriating puzzles, crypotgrams and aphorisms in order to coax each of our dualistic Cartesian mindsets out of our individualised fly-bottles. Within Merton’s writings, on the other hand, we can find at least three attempts to crack this problem by three related, but quite different solutions

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(which has led, perhaps unfairly but understandably, to charges laid at Merton’s feet over the years of eclecticism and syncretism). The first is the one that occurred to Merton as a young man – his encounter on the trams of New York with the writings of Étienne Gilson, especially his Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. From this work he became interested in what he later characterised as ‘the search for Being’ as being at the root of his conversion from post-modern lost soul to reborn Trappist monk: Underlying the subjective experience of the individual self there is an immediate experience of Being. This is totally different from an experience of self-consciousness. It is completely non-objective. It has in it none of the split and alienation that occurs when the subject becomes aware of itself as a quasi-object…. In brief this form of consciousness as­ artesian sumes a totally different kind of self-awareness from that of the C thinking-self…. Here the individual is aware of himself as a self-to-bedissolved in self-giving, in love, in ‘letting-go’, in ecstasy, in God. (ZB: 24) This is an attitude that Merton had explored all his life following his conversion to Catholicism in his twenties and developed through his long study of scholastic theology in Gethsemani monastery. However, as revealed in this late quote from Zen, Merton is still striving for the healing of a split (between self and Other) rather than the dispersal of the illusion of a split that Wittgenstein is pursuing in his late works. Accordingly, it is no surprise then that Merton turned to two other sources to seek his way out of his fly-bottle – both from non-Christian traditions: Zen Buddhism and Sufism. As is well documented in Baker and Henry’s Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story (Baker and Henry 1999), from the late 1950s onwards Merton became fascinated with the work of Sufi scholars such as Abdul Aziz, Reza Arasteh, Louis Massignon and Martin Lings (for the full correspondence see The Hidden Ground of Love, ed. Shannon, 1985). This culminated in a series of lectures given to the Gethemani novices during the last two years of his life from 1966–1968. One constant theme in these lectures, which will take us back to Wittgenstein, is the sense that the ‘change of aspect’ required for Sufi (or indeed monastic) insight comes not from thinking or book-work but rather from the act of seeing itself. As he constantly tells the monks: You can’t learn it from a book, you’ve got to learn it by experience. And if you’re learning it by experience, you need somebody else who’s been through the mill to tell you what’s happening to you…. And that is what Sufism is for, is to provide the situation where there is somebody around who knows the score and who can tell you. (Baker and Henry 1999: 149)8 But perhaps even more than Sufism (Merton’s Sufi studies came somewhat later in his life and would perhaps have flowered had he lived longer),

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Merton’s deliverance from the illusory dualism of the cogito lies in his study of Zen. Unlike with his Sufi studies, Merton had over a decade to perfect his understanding of Zen – including many conversations and much correspondence with the noted Zen master D.T. Suzuki (again, see Shannon 1985). This time he was able to write out his mature thoughts on the matter in works such as Zen and the Birds of Appetite and the later revisions of The Inner Experience. Zen-practice, the awareness of Zen-mind and the practice of satori clearly gave Merton the language he needed to escape from his Cartesian fly-­bottle. In particular, from Zen, Merton learns the importance of stressing nonthought, seeing and experience with satori if realization is to happen: Buddhist meditation, but above all that of Zen, seeks not to explain but to pay attention, to become aware, to be mindful, in other words to develop a certain kind of consciousness that is above and beyond deception by verbal formulas – or by emotional excitement. (ZB: 38) Zen therefore encourages a certain type of ‘authentic metaphysical intuition which is also existential and empirical’ (ZB: 38), for the Zen practitioner sees ‘what is right there and does not add any comment, any interpretation, any judgement, any conclusion’ (ZB: 53). Thus Zen provided a means for Merton whereby he could articulate ‘a breakthrough, an explosive liberation from one-dimensional conformism, a recovery of unity which is not the suppression of opposites but a simplicity beyond opposites’ (ZB: 140). A breakthrough, or revolution, not just for the practitioner but to the whole of a culture dominated by the dead-ends of objectification and reification: The inner self is as secret as God and, like Him, it evades every concept that tries to seize hold of it with full possession. It is a life that cannot be held and studied as object, because it is not a ‘thing’. (IE: 7) Using the concepts of Zen, then, Merton is able to escape the fly-bottle of dualism to articulate a position not a million miles from that presented by Wittgenstein. This is no better illustrated by the very Wittgensteinian inverted commas Merton brings to his final (revised) remarks of The Inner Experience: The ‘reality’ through which the contemplative ‘penetrates’ in order to reach a contact with what is ‘ultimate’ in it is actually his own being, his own life. The contemplative is not one who directs a magic spiritual intuition upon other objects, but one who, begin perfectly united in himself and recollected in the center of his own humility, enters into contact with reality by an immediacy that forgets the division between subject and object. (IE: 151)

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In these last few crucial years, then, Merton was clearly struggling as much with the notions of ‘inner and outer’ as Wittgenstein was in his final years. In a letter to Suzuki written on 11 April 1959 he ponders when contemplating the differences between Christianity and Zen: The Christ we seek is within us, in our inmost self, is our inmost self, and yet infinitely transcends ourselves. We have to be ‘found in Him’ and yet be perfectly ourselves and free from the domination of any image of Him other than Himself… Christ Himself is in us as unknown and unseen. (Shannon 1985: 564) In passages such as this it is almost as if Merton’s (theological) conceptual apparatus is collapsing and it is only notions such as Zen (or Sufism) that will give him the language to present what he is experiencing in these last extraordinary years. It is striking, and a little sad, then, that in Zen and the Birds of Appetite, having referenced Wittgenstein’s famous aphorism from the Investigations – Don’t Think, Look! – in support of his notion that Zen ‘blasts out’ the preconceptions of the mind ‘by using language against itself’ so that ‘we can see directly’ (ZB: 49), he concludes Zen with a thin attack on what he terms ‘the canonization of “ordinary speech” by linguistic analysis’ (ZB: 49). Given the state of post-Wittgensteinian analytical philosophy by the time Merton wrote these words in 1968 this is perhaps not surprising. As I have argued elsewhere (Tyler 2011) the post-­Wittgensteinian splitting of Wittgensteinian interpretation into various rival ‘camps’, coupled with some strange editorial choices on behalf of his literary executors (again see Tyler 2011) has led to some of the ill-informed and frankly prejudicial views that still attach to Wittgenstein’s name and philosophy to this day. With the unedited state of the Investigations at the time of its publication in 1953 (the version which Merton would have read) and the lack of supporting material such as the Last Writings I have used in this chapter, it is perhaps unsurprising that Merton would not have found in the Austrian’s writings what he was looking for. I hope to have demonstrated here that there are sufficient congruencies between their two approaches to justify my claim that both these twentieth century masters are working in the same direction to release the Cartesian fly from its post-modern flybottle. In support of this contention I would like to conclude by examining how both develop a notion of ‘clarity’ or ‘perspicuous view’ as necessary preconditions for the ‘Change of Aspect’ so essential for both their philosophies.

Cassian and the conditions of prayer As stated, as Merton struggled with the issues we have discussed in this chapter in his study of Zen and Sufism during his last decade he was also teaching the novices of Gethsemani monastery as novice master. The contents of these lectures are preserved for us today in two forms – original tapes of the selected lectures held by the Thomas Merton Foundation and the recently published lecture notes that Merton made for these same lectures (ed. O’Connell,

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2005). To conclude, I would like to cite one of these lectures and reveal how Merton approaches the problems I have explored in this chapter before ending with some final remarks from Wittgenstein. The lecture I want to concentrate on is contained in the series published as ‘Cassian and the Fathers: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition’ and involves Merton’s commentary on the following lines from Cassian’s Conferences, Book 9:3.2: For whatever our soul was thinking about before the time of prayer inevitably occurs to us when we pray as a result of the operation of memory. Hence we must prepare ourselves before the time of prayer to be the prayerful persons that we wish to be. Quidquid enim anima nostra ante orationis horam conceperit, necesse est nobis per recordationem occurrere in ipsa oratione. Quamobrem quales volumes inveniri orantes, tales debemus nos praeparare ante tempus orationis. Having presented the passage to the novices Merton asks them: ‘How should you want to be at the time of prayer?’9 before picking on one Br. Cuthbert (clearly a pious type) with the question: ‘How would you like to be found at the time of prayer Br. Cuthbert’. The good brother responds (as if replying by rote): ‘A peace resulting from docility to the will of God’. Without missing a beat Merton takes the response in his stride and proceeds to present his own interpretation of Cassian, informed, as I argue here, by his Zen readings. For, Merton stresses, what we should seek in the pursuit of prayer and contemplation is ‘a kind of peace where we have clarity – this is the word we should emphasise – there should be clarity in prayer.’ He continues: We should strive for clarity. Our prayers should be intelligent. What is stressed are good intentions. Yes good intentions are OK. But we need intelligent good intentions…. Therefore in prayer it is important that we seek the truth with intelligence…. If in prayer you are trying to sharpen up a scientifically perfect concept of God or something you’re going to have a hard time. Most of the time it isn’t possible at all. But if you can get clarity about your relationship with God, which is certainly possible, that is what you are looking for in prayer. From the point of view of my argument here what is fascinating is that Merton introduces the concept of ‘clarity’ into Cassian’s reflections on prayer – a notion that isn’t in Cassian’s passages themselves. Commenting on Cassian in Zen and the Birds of Appetite, Merton would later say how he finds Cassian’s emphasis on puritas cordis / purity of heart not yet Zen because it still maintains that the supreme consciousness resides in a distinct heart which is pure … and ready to receive a vision of God. It is still very aware of a ‘pure’, distinct and separate self-consciousness. (ZB: 9)10

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So, in his talks with the novices, even before Zen and the Birds of Appetite is written, Merton is clearly already unhappy with Cassian’s concept of purity of heart and has replaced it with the more Zen-like ‘clarity’.11 Staunen ist Denken When Wittgenstein was returning to the work of philosophy in the 1930s after his own self-enforced exile of over a decade from its practice, he expresses his own new approach to the task of philosophy in language very reminiscent of Merton’s. From this time onwards he sees philosophy as possessing a clear method or as he describes it in the Philosophical Investigations and the Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (RFGB), eine Übersichtliche Blick/Übersichtliche ­Darstellung – a ‘clear overview’ or, as it is often translated, a ‘perspicuous view’ – literally – a ‘way of seeing’. This ‘perspicuous view’, he states, is ‘of fundamental importance’ to his approach and he describes it as that which: ‘brings about the understanding which consists precisely in the fact that we “see the connections”. Hence the importance of finding Zwischengliedern (“connecting links”)’ (PI: 133). These Zwischengliedern ‘do nothing but direct the attention to the similarity, the relatedness of the facts’. As he states it in the final text of the Philosophical Investigations: A main source of our misunderstandings is that we do not übersehen (oversee) the use of our words. – Our Grammar is lacking an Übersichtlichkeit (overview). – The Übersichtliche Darstellung produces the understanding which allows us to ‘see connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing Zwischengliedern. The concept of the Übersichtliche Darstellung is of fundamental significance for us. It designates our Darstellungsform (viewpoint), the way we see things. (Is this a Weltanschauung?). (PI: 122) Which returns us to the conditions of the dawning of an aspect with which we began this chapter. In the Investigations Wittgenstein is at pains to distinguish between ‘the continuous seeing’ of an aspect (such as the duck-­ rabbit) and the ‘dawning’ / Aufleuchten of an aspect (PI xi 194e/PU 520) for as he explains ‘the expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged’ (PI xi 196e/PU 522). For Aspect-seeing/the Dawning of an Aspect is a ‘halfvisual, half-thought experience’ (LWP 1: 554 das Erlebnis des Aspektswechsels/ das Aufleuchten des Aspekts scheint halb Seh-, halb Gedankenerlebnis). I would interpret this as Wittgenstein suggesting that the dawning of an aspect really goes beyond the logical faculty to a place that is ‘half seen / half thought’. Almost against the pull of reason the conditions for the change of aspect reach

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beyond the bound of Aristotelian logic: ‘Aristotelian logic brands a contradiction as a non-sentence, which is to be excluded from language. But this logic only deals with a very small part of the logic of our language’ (LWP 1: 525). For as Wittgenstein beautifully concludes: ‘Dem Aspektwechsel wesentlich ist ein Staunen. Und Staunen ist Denken’: ‘The Change of Aspect is essentially an astonishment. And astonishment is thinking’ (LWP 1: 565). One of the chief characteristics of the Change of Aspect is that it occurs against our will (LWP 1: 612); it occupies, we could say, adopting the language of mystical theology, the place of unknowing. Thus, although expressed in different ways, I would suggest that Wittgenstein’s Blick that allows us to see the ‘dawning of an Aspect’ and Merton’s Zen-like Cassian ‘clarity’, are both evoked against the common enemy of the objective-subjective dualistic Cartesian fly-bottle that forces our thoughts in a certain (unhealthy) direction. Both ‘seers’ would prefer to trust the intuition of the ‘half thought-half seen’ aspect-forming view (Wittgenstein) / clarity of contemplative vision (Merton) in their battle against what Wittgenstein would famously sum up as the ‘bewitchment of our language’. As Merton tells his novices: ‘One of the most important things in the life of prayer is to let a great deal go on without knowing quite what is going on’, for, the great danger to prayer is learning how to act in a spiritual way. The thing that holds us down in prayer is that we want to act in a way which we are accustomed to that is not necessarily God’s way. Too much reflection on prayer, or worse, trying to force our thoughts along in a certain prescribed ‘spiritual way’ will lead us away from the goal that we seek. As with Wittgenstein, ‘astonishment is thinking’ – we could even say – ‘astonishment is prayer’. As Merton describes it in one of his last lectures on Sufism: We tend to think that (the spiritual life) works like this: We do something very generous then you get a flood of consolation and you press the right button every Monday morning and then you swim through the week on a tide of consolation and start again at the next weekend. On the contrary, as he bluntly puts it, the spiritual life is going well ‘when a person realises what a mess he is in’12 – when the intellect and heart have dried and the thought of God’s consolation seems furthest removed. For, after weeks, months, years of this: All of a sudden, at the right moment the thing comes in a flash – and you see the whole thing and find you’ve covered a great deal of ground without realising it. You suddenly come out in a whole new place. Its what they call a breakthrough. And what you do is you breakthrough into a deeper level of yourself. What you find is a deeper truth that’s really in you – and it’s not yours, it’s God’s.

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In conclusion, Merton in these late lectures as well as late works such as the revised Inner Experience and Zen, stresses as well as his Zen-Cassian notion of ‘clarity’ the importance of unknowing as essential bases for presenting the right conditions for the Wittgensteinian change of Aspect that can occur in prayer. By placing Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy alongside the spiritual exercises of Merton we are presented with two twentieth-century masters meeting over a theological-philosophical divide. In the Last Writings, Wittgenstein concludes that ‘experiencing a change of aspect is similar to an action’ (LWP 2: 14e). The thought, sight and action of a Change of Aspect are all intimately linked (not for nothing did he consider ‘In the beginning was the deed’ as the epithet for the Investigations). Merton sees contemplation as both seeing, thinking and acting too, leading to a ‘level of experience that society does not really encourage and does not really want’. We have seen how for Wittgenstein the aim of philosophy was to ‘show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’ (PI: 309). For him philosophy could never be an abstract rarefied discipline, it had to have a practical, ethical dimension. For him, the right seeing of true philosophy will bring about right action. In this respect I will conclude by saying that I believe that the Wittgensteinian Blick, despite Merton’s reluctance to admit it, shares many characteristics with the ‘Zen-Christian’ mind of Merton that we have explored here. Both of them with their gestures and comments nudge us in certain directions so that in Wittgenstein’s case we can begin to ‘see the world aright’ (T: 6.54) and in that of Merton we will establish the correct conditions to be brought into deeper contemplative relationship with God. Their comments interrupt the spontaneous, unselfconscious flow of the dualistic Cartesian mind forcing us to re-evaluate our place in the world and our attitude to it. By using language, similes and metaphors in unusual and provocative ways (as indeed Merton tells us is the role of Zen master in ZB: 34) both authors bring us back to what we knew already but were unable to express in words. Radical revolutionaries and reactive conservatives both, Wittgenstein and Merton sought throughout their troubled lives the change of aspect that would afford them the existential peace they longed for and which, I have argued here, they both finally glimpsed in their last tantalisingly incomplete, and yet strangely prophetic, writings.

Notes 1 This notion is presented in The Third Wittgenstein – The Post Investigations Works (Moyal-Sharrock 2004) and is supported by Wittgenstein’s executor and editor G.H. von Wright: ‘I lean, myself, towards the opinion that Part 1 of the Investigations is a complete work and that Wittgenstein’s writings from 1946 onwards represent in certain ways departures in new directions’ (Von Wright 1982: 136). 2 Interestingly this final part is deleted in the published version of the Investigations: ‘Its causes are of interest to psychologists, not to me’ in LWP becomes ‘Its causes are of interest to psychologists’ in the final version of PI. Was one of his

Wittgenstein reads Merton  107 editors worried about Wittgenstein’s perceived anti-psychologism here – or that his method somehow transcends psychology? As no editorial guidance was given for this decision in 1953 we cannot know. 3 The official translation here is ‘Do not try to analyse your own inner experience’. 4 See also LWP 2.13e: ‘The aspect seems to belong to the structure of the inner materialization’. 5 Although see my essay ‘To Centre or Not to Centre’ in Tyler 2013 where I deconstruct the notion of ‘the inner’ with respect to the writings of Ss Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. 6 Both authors share the distinction of having just as much published after their deaths as in their lifetimes. As with Wittgenstein, editors have been sometimes less than transparent about giving their reasons for certain editorial choices. However this makes studying the posthumous work more challenging and exciting for the serious research student! 7 In similar vein see Tyler 2013. 8 Baker and Henry tend to tidy up Merton’s somewhat rambling style in their transcript of his lectures. I shall shortly give some of my own transcription which I have left more or less as Merton gives it. 9 What follows are my own transcriptions of the lecture tapes available from the Merton Foundation under the title ‘Credence Cassettes’. Where I have drawn on his lecture notes I state this. 10 Note Merton’s use of inverted commas again. As much as Wittgenstein, Merton is fond of using style to inject the right element of detached irony in his writing. 11 See Also Shannon 1985: 568: ‘Cassian is clearly not deep enough in his idea of “purity of heart”’ Letter to D. T. Suzuki 30.11.1959. 12 Letter to Etta Gullick 1.8.1966: ‘In the long run I think progress in prayer comes from the Cross and humiliation and whatever makes us really experience our total poverty and nothingness and gets our mind off ourselves’ (Shannon 1985: 376).

Bibliography Works by Thomas Merton CF Cassian and the Fathers: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition. Ed. P. O’Connell. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2005. HGL The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters on Religious Experience and Social Concern. Ed. W. Shannon. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1985. IE The Inner Experience: Notes on Contemplation. Ed. W. Shannon. London: SPCK, 2003. SS The Seven Storey Mountain. Reprint 1990, London: SPCK, 1948. ZB Zen and the Birds of Appetite. Kentucky: The Abbey of Gethsemani, 1968. The Lectures to Novices are available on Credence Cassettes, The National Catholic Reporter, USA.

Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein LPP Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–47. From the Notes of P. Geach, K.Shah and A. Jackson. Ed. P. Geach. London: Harvester, 1988. LWP Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982.

108  Peter Tyler PI Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Oxford: Blackwell, 1958. RFGB Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, reprinted in ‘Philosophical Occasions 1912– 1951’ eds. J.C. Klagge and A. Nordmann. Cambridge: Hackett, 1993. RPP Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. Ed. G.H. von Wright and H. Nyman. Oxford: Blackwell, 1980. T Tractatus Logico-Philsophicus. Trans. D. F.Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. VB Vermischte Bemerkungen in Volume 8: Werkausgabe in 8 Bände. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. W Werkausgabe in 8 Bände. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. Z Zettel. Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967.

Other works cited Baker, R. and Henry, G., (eds). (1999) Merton and Sufism: The Untold Story. Louisville: Fons Vitae. Cassian, J. (1997) The Conferences. Ed. B. Ramsey. New York: Newman Press. Gilson, E. (1940) The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. New York: Scribner’s. Moyal-Sharrock, D. (ed.), (2004) The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works. London: Ashgate. Tyler, P.M. (2011) The Return to the Mystical: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Teresa of Avila and the Christian Mystical Tradition. London: Continuum. Tyler, P.M. (2013) ‘To Centre or Not to Centre: Ss. Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross and the “Centre of the Soul”’ in Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology-­B etween Transcendence and Immanence, ed. L. Nelstrop and S. Podmore. Surrey: Ashgate. von Wright, G.H. (1982) Wittgenstein. Oxford: Blackwell.

7 Mystical theology and the renewal of contemplative spiritual practice Julienne McLean and Christopher C.H. Cook

Abstract Mystical theology is intimately related to spiritual practice. Spiritual practice, understood here as being concerned with the prayerful encounter with God amidst the whole of life, is concerned with the mundane as well as with the sacred. But prayer is deeply paradoxical. It is concerned with what is not known, and with what is unconscious, as much or more than it is concerned with what is known. It is not something that can be ‘done’. It is only found in a process of letting go. This dynamic is explored in relation to the content of other chapters of this book, including the life of Margery Kempe, contemplative prayer, spiritual direction, pilgrimage, and the practice of daily prayer amidst the routines of ordinary life.

Introduction Mystical theology, like all theology, is not primarily theoretical; it is concerned rather with the living of life, and especially with a life lived in the context of an experience of the Divine. Mystical experience may come unexpectedly, and it is not necessarily the case that it is a reward for those who have lived pious and holy lives, but often it does come in the context of a life of prayer and spiritual practice. If it does so, we need not understand this as cause and effect in some predictable way, but rather as a part of a dialogue between the human being and God. We might say that mystical experience is in some way experienced as God’s response to prayer. Mystical theology is also concerned with the human response to God; with praxis as prayer. Mystical theology is thus intimately concerned with spiritual practice, in the sense that such practices are a part of a dialogue between God and human beings, a part of the way in which human beings express themselves towards God. Spiritual practices are easily viewed as something additional, as something that spiritual people do, but which other people do not do. They are thus a kind of optional extra in life, for those who want them. Such a view suggests a narrow definition of spiritual practice, rather like a peculiar hobby, without which most people can manage quite well. This perspective fails to recognise both the inherent spirituality of all human life – and thus all praxis  – and

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the immanence of God in all things. Moreover, it fails to recognise the integral relationship between praxis and well-being.1 Mystical theology does not overlook this link between the way in which we live our lives and the extent to which we flourish as human beings. In the present chapter we will consider some of the spiritual practices that have been addressed or alluded to by other authors who have contributed to this volume. We will also draw on some other resources from the Christian mystical tradition from which we have each benefited. In each case, we are only offering some examples, and we hope that the reader will explore more widely some of the implications that arise within their own practice, drawing on the rich and diverse resources of other Christian traditions. But, first, we must consider briefly the nature of well-being.

Well-being There have been many definitions of the nature of ‘well-being’ over the past few decades, and it has tended to be a rather vague, generalised concept that reflects values, philosophies, influences and theologies of various, and often differing, individuals and groups. Dictionary definitions refer to a condition of contentment, health, success or welfare, and modern academic notions of ‘well-being’ have usually been explored from subjective, psychological, physical health and economic perspectives. These perspectives are somewhat limited, and reductionist, compared to the traditional Christian spiritual understanding of a more holistic view of human well-being, which links ‘well-being’ to happiness, virtue or the ‘good life’ (Cook 2011, p. 153). We would like to explore a fuller vision of human well-being, from a Christian perspective, which is the focus of the chapters of this book. Human well-being includes all parts of the human being which are so closely connected and intertwined – spiritual, mental, emotional physical and social/ community aspects. Ancient Christian understanding has looked beyond limited, instrumental, or reductionist, approaches to ask, ‘What is it that makes a good life of the whole human person, a life that is flourishing, rather than simply struggling along?’ One central feature to emerge from Christian texts, especially from the early Desert tradition, the Philokalia and the writings of the Spanish mystics in the sixteenth century, is a view, perspective and understanding that human well-being is contingent upon the only non-contingent source of well-being, which is God. Well-being is thus about being able to participate, as fully as possible, in the life of God, in Christ (Cook 2011, p. 201). In this tradition, human well-being is ultimately concerned with an orientation to the Divine, to God, and that the primary and ultimate source of our well-being is found in our journey and relationship towards, and in, God. So, we could understand that full human well-being is concerned, fundamentally, with experience of the Divine, which is the focus of Andrew Louth’s chapter. He comments on Vladimir Lossky’s book The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church and explores the shift in the modern understanding

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of mysticism, and mystical theology, in the early/mid twentieth century, in terms of coming less to mean strange experiences such as visions and levitations, to more of a defined sense of the ‘mystical’, or an experience of the Divine, through a deepening of a life of prayer within the sacramental life of the Church community. Louth quotes the following passage from The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, in which Lossky elucidates his understanding of the ‘mystical’: The eastern tradition has never made a sharp distinction between the mystical and theology; between personal experience of the divine mysteries and the dogma affirmed by the Church… To put it another way, we must live the dogma expressing a revealed truth, which appears to us as an unfathomable mystery, in such a fashion that instead of assimilating the mystery to our mode of understanding, we should, on the contrary, look for a profound change, an inner transformation of the spirit, enabling us to experience it mystically… For the Christian, therefore, the mystical cannot exist without theology, but, above all, there is no theology without the mystical… The mystical is accordingly treated in the present work as the perfecting and crown of all theology: as theology par excellence.2 The ‘mystical’ is thus integrally related both to experience of the Divine and to the task of theology. Indeed, theology is, necessarily, both mystical and experiential. Louth explores further what Lossky meant by ‘mystical theology’, suggesting that he starts from an understanding of the mystical as bound up with some kind of inward, personal experience, beyond conceptualisation, which ultimately becomes identical with participating in the sacramental life of the Church community, as the human mind and heart becomes conformed to God and his revelation of Love through the Son and the Spirit. Peter Tyler also explores the nature of inner experience in his chapter in relation to the works of Wittgenstein and Merton. Here, the inwardness of the experience of prayer is recognised as a problem – it is delusional, illusory, elusive and distracting. Rather than being consummated in sacrament or in conformity to God, it is resolved rather in an unknowing that overcomes the subject-object dualism. Here, Christ is found within, but is unknown, unseen. Paradoxically, this subverts the very possibility of spiritual practice. God is found not as a reward or result following something that we ‘do’, but rather as an astonishment, a sudden change of perspective, a gracious response to what we cannot do. Prayer leads us to God when we realise ‘what a mess we are in’. We are thus most in a state of well-being when we least have confidence in, or awareness of, ourselves. Many other Christian saints and mystics down the centuries have explored the importance of mystical theology in relationship to a vision of the fullness and wholeness of human well-being as experienced in relationship with God. An example of this that has been very influential upon each of us is that of the

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great Spanish mystics and saints of the sixteenth century. Francisco de Osuna, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross wrote extensively on the journey of prayer and the spiritual life, within the context of mystical theology (McLean 2013; Tyler 2011). One of the most important spiritual teachers and writers of the time, Francisco de Osuna, whose Third Spiritual Alphabet was a significant influence upon Teresa of Avila, wrote about mystical theology as a ‘hidden’ theology, which differs from other branches of learning. For Osuna, mystical theology is concerned with the will. It is the theology ‘of God’s just lovers’: ‘this theology will be perfected by adding love and it will no longer remain hidden, but be manifest to all, for the youngest to the oldest’ (Giles and Kavanaugh 1981, p. 162). 3 This theology is not to be learned in the same way as the ‘speculative’ theology with which Osuna contrasts it. Speculative theology is learned most easily by those who are intelligent, and requires the reading of books, careful attention, practice, and a good teacher. In contrast: The hidden theology we are describing, however, is not attained by those tools as much as through pious love and exercising moral virtues to prepare and purge the soul. The soul also needs other theological virtues to enlighten it: the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the evangelical beatitudes in accordance with the three hierarchal acts of purgation, illumination and perfection. (Giles and Kavanaugh 1981, p. 162) Mystical theology is thus concerned with a life lived in love of God and others, and according to the spiritual disciplines (the life of ‘purgation’ as Osuna knew it). This is not pursued through learning, books and teachers; indeed De Osuna emphasized that it is not possible to ‘teach’ this theology: ‘I do not presume to teach it in the alphabet, nor can any mortal can do so, for Christ reserves to himself the ministry of secretly teaching the hearts where that theology lives hidden like a divine science’ (Giles and Kavanaugh 1981, p. 161). Osuna employs a variety of names for this tradition of mystical theology. It is the way of wisdom, profundity, and the ‘art of love’.4 It is also called union because the person who attains to God in this prayer is made one spirit with him by an interchange of wills whereby he wants only what God wants and God remains with mans’ will and together they are like one in everything, similar to two things that are so perfectly united that they almost cease to be themselves and become totally conformed into a third being. (Giles and Kavanaugh 1981, p. 164) If mystical theology is concerned with well-being, then in this tradition (as in other Christian traditions), it is certainly not about an easy or

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comfortable understanding of what it means to be in a state of wellness. It is concerned with what the later depth psychologists would refer to as the subconscious, and thus with things which human beings tend to repress and avoid because, when exposed to the light of consciousness, they make us uncomfortable: This exercise is known as profundity with respect to the depth and darkness of the devotion, for it originates in the depths of man’s heart, which is dark because human understanding has been deprived of light. Seeing the heart plunged into shadows, the spirit of God comes over the heart on the waters of desire to proclaim his divine light. (Giles and Kavanaugh 1981, p. 165) Osuna clearly states that the whole subject of his Third Spiritual Alphabet was a continuation of the ancient lineage of Christian mystical theology in his time: Some call it mystical theology, which means hidden, because the good teacher Jesus imparts it in the secret hiding place of the heart. Wishing to reserve this teaching for himself, he gave his followers a smaller role and less authority to instruct in this than in any other learning. As our principal teacher, he kept for himself this principal doctrine, for among all disciplines theology is the queen and lady of learning who, according to the wise man, calls her ladies, meaning the other sciences, to the castle of faith where they are to serve their mistress, theology. (Giles and Kavanaugh 1981, p. 161) Thus, the tradition of mystical theology is essentially describing knowledge of God that is imparted ‘in the secret hiding place of the heart’ and is obscure to the human mind or intellect (McLean 2013, p. xvii; Tyler 2011, Chapter 5). We thus return to the paradox that Tyler elucidates in relation to Wittgenstein and Merton. Prayer is a finding of Christ within us, but we find only in losing, we know only in unknowing. We encounter God in prayer, yet prayer is not something that we can ‘do’. Prayer as a spiritual practice is – in this sense – impossible.

Expressing the inexpressible Corrine Saunders, in her chapter, looks at Margery Kempe’s experiences, as recorded in the Book of Margery Kempe. She explores an approach foregrounding mystical theology, with its emphasis on an individual spiritual life. This coincides with a new interest in Margery’s inner voices and visionary experiences in recent scholarship.5 Margery’s theology can be seen as mystical, as her book recounts her experiences of mystical phenomena across her life; experiences of what she clearly believed to be a supernatural kind in which she believed that she directly, and personally, gained immediate knowledge of God.

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In writing of Margery’s experiences of the Divine, Saunders refers to her attempt to ‘express the inexpressible’. How can we express the ineffable, the ‘many secret things’ that we experience, Margery asks herself? Words can gesture towards, but never entirely capture feeling, always being removed from experience. The book returns again and again to the gap between earthly and celestial, the impossibility of articulating the sublime. Margery’s spiritual joy and comfort are ‘so marvellous that she could never tell of it as she felt it’.6 Her holy thoughts are ‘so subtle and heavenly that she could never describe them afterwards, as she had them in feeling’.7 Saunders’ demonstrates that Margery’s words mark the attempt of an uneducated, in some ways simple, woman to convey complex philosophical and theological concepts. Her Book is, in a way, itself a spiritual practice devised to this end. It describes a variety of Margery’s other spiritual practices, such as visualisation and meditation, pilgrimage, participation in the Eucharist, and ascetic discipline. The Book attempts to articulate that which cannot be articulated but, rather than doing this in complex verbal ways (as other, more sophisticated and highly educated, authors have done), Margery does it in simple concrete and highly visual ways. She articulates very forcefully and unambiguously the emotion behind the images – the strange invasion of the body in her cryings becomes at once a physical sign sent by God, a spiritual test, and the means to illumination of the soul. These wordless sounds also capture the unknowability, the impossibility of articulating in language, the nature of our experience of, and relationship to, the Divine. Saunders highlights that Margery’s noise – in all its senses – made her both remarkable and distrusted, yet it was precisely through that noise that she left her mark on society. Through the writing of her Book, through the medium of scribes and through the conventions of devotional writing as a spiritual practice, Margery’s extraordinary voice takes on a new authority, with her ‘inner eye and ear’ open to rich imaginative landscapes. Her homely yet profound narrative, over half a millennium on, can still speak to us today of deep and immediate spiritual experiences and revelation, as a specifically and idiosyncratically female imitatio Christi, which is the model offered by many contemplative texts over the centuries.

Contemplation as ‘the praying cure’ Spiritual practices, if viewed as essential for the well-being of the whole person, may be understood as offering a kind of therapy, or healing, for the soul, mind and body.8 Healing of the soul is brought about through many ways, primarily through meditation and prayer, pain and suffering, the compassion of God, wisdom and reproof (Cook 2012, p. 231). It is thus a result of both active spiritual practices and passive receipt of that which God bestows – ­often in experiences of darkness or adversity. Similarly, the modern practice of counselling/psychotherapy, and the understanding of the psyche from a Jungian perspective (McLean 2013, pp. 87–146) can be very helpful as a part of

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the journey toward healing, wholeness and well-being. For example, Jungian analytical psychology is generally open to the spiritual dimension of human personhood, and is both something at which the patient must actively work, at the same time as they are passively in receipt of analysis by a therapist. Within the ‘shadow’ experiences of the human psyche, conferred by life and interpreted in therapy, the soul is able to grow and flourish. For healing of the whole person, we would argue, a telos is ultimately required which is firmly located in, and towards, the Divine. A telos of this kind is essential if progress is to be made in moving towards a contemplative ‘unknowing’, transcending human rational thought and ideas. This is the traditional distinction in mystical theology between two ways of knowing, two ways of being or different forms of awareness, which has been described by Christian saints and mystics throughout the centuries. Augustine of Hippo speaks of a higher part of the mind reserved for the contemplation of God and a lower part of the mind that reasons. Evagrius of Pontus, the fourth century monk and writer, is one of a host of contemplative writers to make an important distinction between the calculating, reasoning mind that makes use of concepts in a process we call discursive thought and that dimension of mind that comes to knowledge directly without the mediation of concepts, which he called nous, an intuitive spiritual intelligence. When Evagrius defined prayer as ‘communion of the mind with God’9 he meant a dimension of our consciousness that runs deeper than discursive thought. Thomas Aquinas took up this same distinction and, speaking for virtually the entire tradition, called the aspect of the mind that thinks and calculates ‘lower reason’ and the aspect of the mind that communes directly with God in contemplation ‘higher reason’ (McLean 2007, p. 16). Within the Orthodox tradition, the contemplative dimension is known as hesychia, which is a term describing a quality of stillness and silence (Ware 2000, p. 89). The hesychast tradition describes these two types of knowing or understanding by distinguishing between what they traditionally call the mind and the heart. The term ‘heart’ refers to this non-conceptual form of knowing, what Augustine and Aquinas later call ‘higher reason’. In this tradition, the heart was not the seat of emotions (emotions would be located at roughly the same level as thoughts) but the deep centre of the person. The heart communes with God in a silent and direct way that the conceptual level of our mind does not. The mystical tradition, particularly as emphasised in the writings of the Carmelite saints and mystics, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, asserts that there is a form of consciousness which goes beyond sense impressions, beyond the knowledge we can get from touching, smelling, seeing, hearing, and tasting, which has to do with essences and the inner being of things. This knowledge has to do with the core of our existence, where we confront the silent core of our being. Ultimately, it is divine knowledge, and we can participate in it if we are prepared to embark on the journey into stillness, into quiet, through entering an ascetical process of interior detachment and

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purification from attachments and identifications with sense impressions. In personal terms, the fruit of this deeper journey is that we come to know our self in new ways, this knowledge coming from the Divine, and not from our ego-centric, perspective (McLean 2007, p. 18).

Spiritual direction Most of us need help in this journey towards wellness and spiritual growth. In his chapter on Baron von Hügel (1852–1925), a well-known spiritual director, Kallistos Ware explores some of the important elements in offering spiritual guidance. Ware emphasises three key elements in the practice of spiritual direction from the writings of von Hügel: his understanding of truth as a bright light surrounded by darkness, his dialectical approach insisting on the ‘friction’ of opposites, and his interpretation of religion as a combination of external fact and inner experience. In his appreciation of God’s unknowability and of the value of silence, von Hügel shows himself to be a truly apophatic theologian. But an apophatic spirituality does not deny the importance of speech – either in prayer or in conversation with others. And talking to a spiritual director can help us to better understand what it is that we do not understand, better delineate those frictions in life that cause us pain, and better delineate both the external truths of religious faith and also our inner experiences. All of these things can be difficult to articulate, but the spiritual practice of attempting to articulate them, as best we can, in conversation with a spiritual director, as well as attempting to articulate them in solitude and in prayer, is important. It is not at all the same thing to have tried to put mystical experience into words, only to fail, as it is not to have attempted to do this at all. (Neither is it the same to attempt this task alone as it is to attempt it with another person – such as a spiritual director.) And the attempt is important as a spiritual practice which takes us deeper into the mystery that is God. Of the three elements of religion as he understood them, the historical, the rational and the mystical, it was to the mystical that von Hügel was most attracted, and he saw it as the most important of the three. Speaking of God, he writes: He it is Who, however dimly yet directly, touches our souls and awakens them … to that noblest, incurable discontent with our own petty self and to that sense of and thirst for the Infinitive and Abiding, which articulates man’s deepest requirement and characteristic.10 Von Hügel saw the human being’s ‘deepest requirement and characteristic’ as the potential for direct communion with the living God. Such a communion, expressed in mystical experience, is not something strange and peculiar, but an expression of ‘the innermost normal consciousness of mankind’, which is possible for all without exception. Yet, while possible for all, this experience

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is not easily found or understood. It is paradoxical, elusive and encountered through ‘friction’ and ‘darkness’. To this end, spiritual direction provides invaluable assistance. It orientates us when there are no landmarks, encourages us to carry on even when we think we are lost, and reassures us when we find no assurance from either within or without.

Prayer and daily life In Bernadette Flanagan’s chapter on Quotidian practices, she shows the importance of the daily practice of prayer, especially within new monastic communities. These communities are bearing witness to the many ways in which it is possible to embrace classic monastic ideas and practices (contemplative prayer, ways of living in community and embodied spiritual practices such as fasting and silence) while also reimagining and recasting them to give shape to a new, authentic and sometimes prophetic life practice in quotidian circumstances. This contrasts with the daily practices of Margery Kempe, undertaken firmly outside of monastic community discipline. However, the new monasticism and Margery’s Book share a common concern with the trials and tribulations of daily life, with the oppositions and reassurances provided by others, and with the importance for spiritual growth of the wider communities in which we live. The early desert communities, from which the monastic tradition emerged, emphasised a life apart. Ironically, it was in the context of solitude that the importance of community and relationship were most emphasised. Thus, the importance of hospitality to visitors becomes more acute when visitors are encountered infrequently and only in such an inhospitable environment as that of the north African desert. Amma Syncletica, (as Flanagan describes) in moving to the outskirts of Alexandria, encountered and cared for those who were themselves marginalised from mainstream society. Similarly new monastic communities, in setting themselves apart, paradoxically offer a practice of spirituality which both highlights and more effectively responds to the stresses, clamour and noise of contemporary life. Daily spiritual practices, such as a pattern of daily prayer, create a paradox. On the one hand, incorporation of prayer into a daily routine makes prayer more pervasive. In this sense, it becomes important, it is emphasised and underlined. On the other hand, the familiarity of daily prayer causes it to merge into the background. It can become over-familiar, habitual – almost invisible. Those who pray infrequently are more aware of the difference of prayer – of its contrast with the quotidian order – but only at the expense of making it less frequent, less a part of the fabric of life. Those who pray daily have less sense of what life might look like without prayer. They become more at risk of taking it for granted. But in ‘doing’ prayer on a daily basis, they thus potentially become more aware of their own poverty in prayer – more aware of the paradox that it is God who ‘does’ prayer, and not we ourselves.

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Pilgrimage Rosalind Brown’s chapter on Durham Cathedral emphasises the importance of pilgrimage to important spiritual and sacred sites. The cathedral attracts around 700,000 people every year, and she emphasises how pilgrimage can be a transformative experience because ‘in the mystery of God, there is encounter with the divine while they are here, whether or not they can express it as such’ (p. 77). In the words of the former Dean of the Cathedral: We should not make easy assumptions about God nor think we can ever fully know him or understand his purposes. Perhaps that is what has drawn me into cathedrals for most of my ministry, for these are places where the ‘idea of the holy’, numinous buildings, beautiful liturgy and profound music reach into the soul to help us do justice to the great mysteries of faith (p. 77). Great places of pilgrimages, such as Durham Cathedral, can offer a threshold of something awesome, a place where people encounter a living tradition that has been lived faithfully for centuries and which challenges our contemporary lifestyles and priorities. Brown suggests that pilgrimage can act as a portal to an experience of the Divine, and to an understanding of mystical theology. Pilgrimage sites are liminal places, where it is safe to ask questions and listen for unexpected answers. Elsewhere (Cook 2010), one of us has suggested that as we visit and enquire about holy places, such as Durham Cathedral, they in turn pose questions to us. The historical and spiritual narrative of faith that they provide invites us to locate our story within their story. They offer narratives within which we can find meaning for our own hopes and fears. Exactly how they do this might be open to question, but they offer a kind of scale – symbolic, physical, and temporal – against which we can measure our own experiences. They invite us to join the community of faith which they both represent and (at least in places such as Durham Cathedral) continue to provide a home to. They humble us, challenge us and inspire us. They draw us in to a place of prayer and mystery. Perhaps more importantly, they provide us with a kind of spiritual practice which may then be extrapolated to other places, including those which are decidedly not holy. They help us to appreciate the whole of life as pilgrimage, and find God in ordinary and profane, as well as holy, places.

Mystical theology and spiritual practice In a variety of ways we have explored here the paradox that spiritual practices are both important and unimportant. Ultimately, we cannot ‘do’ anything that brings us closer to God, and we are dependent entirely upon grace for any experience that we might have of God. Only in unknowing do we draw closer to God, and that which we usually count as knowledge or reason

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cannot take us far in the life of prayer and spiritual well-being. However, this is not to say that pilgrimages are not worthwhile, or that daily prayer is of no value. The wise counsel of a good spiritual director, or a good therapist, can help us to see things that we could not see on our own, and within the mysteries of contemplative prayer lay the possibilities for our healing. In this chapter we have only begun to scratch the surface of the wide range of spiritual practices on offer in the Christian tradition. We have given little or no consideration to the sacraments, to fasting, confession, penance, retreats, the Ignatian exercises, lectio divina, social action, mindfulness of mortality, the Jesus prayer, psalmody, or many other spiritual practices. Were we to examine these other practices also, we might broaden our repertoire in some way, and gain a deeper awareness of the diversity of ways in which human beings have sought to engage in practice with mystical theology, spiritual well-being, and the quest for God. However, it is probably also the case that we would find ourselves further repeating our key themes of the inherent paradox and impossibility of the quest. Mystical theology is both inherently something that must be lived, and not only thought or talked about, and also something that can never be ‘done’ but only received. God can only be found ‘within’, and yet in the finding is always elusive. Furthermore, in the course of the quest, distinctions between inner and outer seem to be lost and to become only less comprehensible. Ultimately, spiritual well-being is found only when it is made both our telos and goal, and also that which we are willing to lose. As Jesus is recorded as saying: ‘For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it’.11

Conclusion In conclusion, we would like to propose that mystical theology and spiritual practice, as outlined in this book, is essential for the full growth, and flourishing, of human health and well-being, in all its aspects. However, we would also caution against the placing of undue emphasis on particular methods or practices, and against any view of spiritual practices which might make us too reliant on ourselves or neglectful of our enduring dependence upon the grace of God. Prayer is something that God does, into which we are graciously invited.12 We would like to leave the last word to Thomas Merton: we should not look for a ‘method’ or ‘system’, but cultivate an ‘attitude’, an ‘outlook’: faith, openness, attention, reverence, expectation, supplication, trust, joy. All these finally permeate our being with love in so far as our living faith tells us we are in the presence of God, that we live in Christ, that in the Spirit of God we ‘see’ God our Father without ‘seeing’. We know him in ‘unknowing’. (Merton 1973, p. 39)

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Notes 1 For example, research now shows evidence of significant and generally positive links between religiosity (usually defined as religious practice) and well-being according to various measures. The field, which now includes thousands of original research studies, is well reviewed by Koenig, King and Carson, 2012. 2 Louth’s translation. See pp. 27–28. 3 The Third Spiritual Alphabet 6.2. See Giles and Kavanaugh, 1981, p. 162. 4 Ibid., p. 164. ‘This kind of prayer is also called the art of love because only through love is it realized, and in it love is multiplied more than in any other art or instruction, and also because Christ, the God of love, teaches it to those with a loving heart.’ 5 For example, in the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University, in which Saunders and one of the present authors (CCHC) are both involved. 6 As quoted by Saunders. See p. 52. 7 As quoted by Saunders. See p. 52. 8 Elsewhere, in the context of the Orthodox tradition, one of us (CCHC) has referred to spiritual practices as offering a ‘praying cure’, in contrast to the ‘talking cure’ of Freud and Breuer. 9 On Prayer 3. See Sinkewicz 2003, p. 193. 10 The Mystical Element of Religion, vol. 1, p. 47 – as quoted by Ware (see p. 14). 11 Luke 9:24, New Revised Standard Version. 12 See, for example, Burrows, 2007.

Bibliography Burrows, R. (2007) Essence of Prayer, London: Burns & Oates. Cook, C. (2010) Finding God in a Holy Place, London: Continuum. Cook, C.C.H. (2011) The Philokalia and the Inner Life: On Passions and Prayer, Cambridge: James Clarke. Cook, C.C.H. (2012) Healing, Psychotherapy, and the Philokalia. In Bingaman, B. and Nassif, B. (eds) The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 230–239. Giles, M.E. and Kavanaugh, K. (1981) Francisco De Osuna: The Third Spiritual Alphabet, New York: Paulist. Koenig, H.G., King, D.E. and Carson, V.B. (2012) Handbook of Religion and Health, New York: Oxford University Press. McLean, J. (2007) Teresa of Avila and Depth Psychology, London: The Guild of Pastoral Psychology. McLean, J. (2013) Towards Mystical Union, London: St Paul’s. Merton, T. (1973) Contemplative Prayer, London: Darton, Longman and Todd. Sinkewicz, R.E. (2003) Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, Oxford: Oxford. Tyler, P. (2011) The Return to the Mystical: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Teresa of Avila and the Christian Mystical Tradition, London: Continuum. Ware, K. (2000) The Inner Kingdom, New York: St Vladimir’s Press.

Concluding reflections Mystical theology: renewing the contemplative tradition Christopher C.H. Cook, Julienne McLean and Peter Tyler

Mystical theology, we proposed in the introduction, might be understood as preparing us for God’s communication of himself to us. It is transformational, experiential, affective and active, but it does not ignore or dumb down the intellectual and rational aspects of the Christian faith. Rather, it seeks to engage and illuminate theology in such a way as to rescue it from only being a rational and intellectual exercise. The authors contributing to this volume have opened up a variety of ways in which we might understand this as happening. In these concluding reflections, we would like to draw attention to some cross-cutting themes that emerge from the chapters of this book, and especially to its much maligned concern with ‘experience’. We shall also reflect on some of its omissions. In our introduction, we quoted Jean Gerson as stating that mystical theology is acquired through the ‘school of the affect’ and in Chapter 1 Kallistos Ware quoted Origen in support of his contention that affect – particularly the affect of human suffering – finds a place within the transcendent life of God. Interestingly, von Hügel appeared not to agree – suggesting that in God there is only compassion, but not passion – and Ware takes issue with this (as do we) on the grounds that it is difficult to see how true compassion can be exercised in the absence of passion. Compassion is, as Ware suggests, ‘co-suffering’ and ‘in God there is both perfect joy and perfect suffering’. Louth does not directly discuss the topic of affect, or at least he does not use the same vocabulary as Ware to do so; the word ‘affect’ and its derivatives do not appear in his chapter. Nonetheless, he draws attention, through his summary of Lossky’s work, to a very important affective dynamic. Whereas Lossky starts with an understanding of mystical theology as experiential and inward, he moves towards an understanding of this as ‘more to do with our minds and hearts being conformed to God and his revelation of love through the Son and the Spirit’. Mystical theology is thus not about ecstatic experiences, although it does not exclude these, so much as a seeking to be assimilated to the ‘reality of the love of God’. This reality is ‘manifest in the self-emptying of the Son in the Incarnation’ and the human affective response to it necessarily begins with repentance. The affective dimension of mystical theology is thus far from being simply a seeking of affective experiences for

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their own sake, whether of suffering or of joy. It is rather a human response to the affective reality of the self-emptying love of God in Christ. As Saunders so effectively shows, this dynamic finds admirable expression in the Book of Margery Kempe, yet rarely has an affective piety evoked such a wide range of responses, varying from warm affection through to outright hostility. Margery is at once both admirable and contemptible, not only to her peers but also to modern commentators, who seem to be divided in their opinions of her. Margery’s tears may have attracted much attention, then and now, but she was not unique in her weeping as an expression of piety. Most of her role models seem not to have evoked such hostile reactions.1 Inner affective reactions are one thing, but public displays of emotion are another, and the outward expression of affective states invites, at least potentially, accusations and interpretations of insincerity, attention seeking and deception. Fourteenth-century English spirituality was well aware of all of this, as the writings of Margery’s contemporaries reveal. Public expressions of emotion easily become themselves the focus of attention, or else direct attention to the person affected, rather than directing attention to God. Margery’s tears were often evoked by association with the passion of Christ, and especially so when she was on pilgrimage. Rosalind Brown provides ample testimony to the contemporary emotional responses of pilgrims and visitors to Durham Cathedral.2 Many of the stories that she relates also provide testimony to the suffering that people bring with them to the cathedral, and their experiences of what they found there in the context of that suffering. Brown suggests that the cathedral points beyond itself – to the God revealed in Jesus Christ – and in this sense it serves the purpose of mystical theology to which Louth refers – presenting to us the love of God as something to which we must respond, and with which we will want to be assimilated. Spiritual wellbeing (as argued by McLean and Cook in Chapter 6) is concerned with orientation towards the Divine. The suffering that people bring with them to Durham Cathedral, and the prayer that it evokes, also illustrates the dynamic of prayer identified by Thomas Merton. We easily find ourselves looking for consolation and peace in prayer, and yet we make most progress when we realise ‘what a mess we are in’. As Merton says in one of his letters, quoted from in a footnote in Tyler’s chapter: ‘In the long run I think progress in prayer comes from the Cross and humiliation and whatever makes us really experience our total poverty and nothingness and gets our mind off ourselves’ (Chapter 6, note 12). Perhaps one of the most cogent criticisms of Margery Kempe (notwithstanding her many virtues) is that she often appeared (at least to others) to have her mind on herself. But one of the strongest arguments in affirmation of her spirituality is that her humiliation at the hands of others only seemed to strengthen her resolve in prayer. This humiliation can come from within as well as from the external world. Mystical theology in practice – at least in its psychological mode – is (as discussed in Chapter 7) concerned with having the courage to look within at the things that we repress and do not like about ourselves.

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If mystical theology is concerned with the affective experience of looking within, and of experiencing the humiliation that the world evokes within us, it is also deeply concerned with the suffering of others. Bernadette Flanagan suggests that at the heart of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of what ‘new monasticism’ might mean ‘was solidarity with those who were voiceless and suffering’. She draws further on the writings of Simone Weil and Etty Hillesum as examples of the contemplative dynamic that – far from turning in on itself – in opening to God is decentered so as to receive and respond to the suffering of the world. While we have not explored the theme in any detail in this volume, mystical theology is also actively concerned with responding to the needs of a suffering world – as illustrated in the lives of Francis of Assisi, Florence Nightingale, Teresa of Calcutta and others. A theme that has not been explored here – with the notable exception of Saunders’ chapter on Margery Kempe – is that of the experiencing of visions and voices. This is in part because such phenomena are widely perceived not to be central to mystical experience – and yet, if not central, they are also far from uncommon. For von Hügel such experiences were merely a means to an end, only valuable insofar as they ‘convey some spiritual truth of importance’. This begs the question as to how one discerns whether or not voices and visions do convey such truths.3 Margery sought advice from others concerning her visions and voices, and it seems that she found reassurance and affirmation from her advisors. Her voices were a more or less daily occurrence and had a reassuring quality to them. They affirmed her in the path that she had chosen, they affirmed the value of her tears, and they affirmed her in her understanding of her relationship with God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. However, there is little here to compare with Julian’s Revelations of Divine Love, or with Teresa’s Interior Castle. They do not have the lasting and universal relevance to understanding of the Christian life that marks out, for example, the ‘little way’ of St Thérèse. Rosalind Brown gives an example of a visitor to Durham Cathedral who heard a voice at St Bede’s tomb. This voice – which spoke only three words – was clearly life changing for the woman concerned and led, eventually, to her ordination to the priesthood. As for Margery, the voice that this lady heard seems largely to have been for her own benefit, but rather than affirming her in a path that she had chosen, it seems to have caused her life to change direction.4 We know little about the details – but it would appear that this was a change for the better, and that it has benefitted the wider Church and not her alone. As Saunders has indicated, voice hearing is now known to be a much more commonly occurring phenomenon than has previously been recognised. While some such voices have religious content and associations, most experiences of this kind now occur outside the context of any particular faith tradition, albeit they may still be experienced as ‘spiritual’ in some way. Are these mystical experiences? Presumably they are, sometimes, but not always. The question for mystical theology is not so much whether such experiences occur

124  Christopher C.H. Cook et al.

as how to judge their value as encounters with the divine, and this may in the end depend upon their impact upon people’s lives, for good or ill, as much (or more than) any intellectual or rational assessment of their truth. As William James famously suggested in the first of his 1901–1902 Gifford Lectures, ‘by their fruits ye shall know them’ ( James 1985). For Brown’s anonymous pilgrim in Durham Cathedral, the fruits appear to have been very good. We have not addressed here the possible interpretation or value of mystical experiences occurring in other faith traditions. We have deliberately confined ourselves to the Christian tradition, and we do not intend to enter here into the debate about whether or not there is a ‘core’ mystical experience that is common to diverse faith traditions.5 This is not to say that there is not value in the study of other traditions, and we affirm the value of dialogue between such traditions. In Chapter 6 Tyler shows how Thomas Merton benefitted from insights drawn both from Sufism and Buddhism. However, we have undertaken our work within the tradition to which we belong and with which we are most familiar. The notion of experience – especially religious or mystical experience – is contested. As Nicholas Lash (1988, p. 92) has argued, experience ‘includes a great deal more than mental goings-on’. Experiences are not separable from our interpretations and explanations of them, and inevitably include all kinds of assumptions, including religious assumptions, about the way that the world is. To talk of experience of God is especially problematic, given that God is not an object from which we can distance ourselves. Experience of God is, as Lash has also argued, ‘ordinary’. And a Christian account of ‘the experiences that matter most’ should, as he suggests, have an appropriate Christological emphasis on the importance of suffering (Lash 1988, p. 251). However, we do not agree with Lash that ‘speaking of “mysticism” and “mystics” risks perpetuating the quite unchristian misapprehension that “experience of God” is, at best, something esoteric and, at worst, close cousin to the paranormal, (Lash 1996, p. 171). It is equally arguable that speaking of Christian mysticism, and Christian mystics, affirms something at the heart of both Christianity and mysticism, and at the heart of wider ‘experiences of God’, which is fundamentally both fully Christian and fully human. The essays included in the present volume have – we think – illustrated this. An emphasis on mysticism as ‘experience’ (even experience of God) does, however, run the risk of distracting from something that is of fundamental importance to the nature of mysticism and mystical theology. Rather than being concerned primarily with experience, mysticism is concerned primarily with prayer. As Louth explained in his chapter, Lossky’s concept of ‘la mystique’ had ‘little to do with “mysticism”, in its still common sense of something unusual and esoteric, but with the deepening of a life of prayer within the sacramental life of the Church’. Similarly, the new monastic communities described by Flanagan are primarily concerned with finding new and diverse ways of pursuing a daily life of prayer.

Concluding reflections  125

Poulain, in his classic treatise The Graces of Interior Prayer, begins by dividing prayer into two categories: the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary’, or mystical, varieties. Mystical prayer is that which ‘our own industry is powerless to produce, even in a low degree, even momentarily’ (Poulain 1950, p. 1). While we would wish to distance ourselves from what now easily appears to be the crude supernaturalism that Poulain attributes to mystical prayer, we think that it is still helpful to recognise that prayer is not primarily something which we do. As Ruth Burrows (2007) has suggested, it is rather (at least in its more mystical forms) something which God is doing, in which we are graciously invited to participate. As von Hügel (quoted by Ware) asserted, we can indeed direct our attention to God, and as Merton (quoted by Tyler) suggests, we can pursue clarity in prayer. But attention only makes us receptive, and clarity is not always within our grasp. As Merton (again quoted by Tyler) says ‘the great danger to prayer is learning how to act in a spiritual way’. Prayer is, as Tyler says, about a change of perspective – an astonishment – which we cannot engineer. For Margery Kempe – whether she be viewed as mystic or not – prayer was a primary concern. It was both something that she did (frequently) but also something that she experienced (as she would have it, miraculously). Brown emphasises Durham Cathedral as a place of prayer, and illustrates this with people’s experiences of prayer, at least some of which were both surprising and unexpected. If mystical theology is concerned with experience, then (as argued in Chapter 7) it is the experience of prayer as God’s response more than it is the experience of prayer as something that we do. However, it is fundamentally not about the seeking of experiences for their own sake. It is concerned with seeking God for his (or her) own sake, and God is encountered in our experiences of a suffering world as much, or more, than in visions and voices. We hope you will agree with the conclusions of the essays gathered here that the study of mystical theology, rather than being an abstract or irrelevant side-show may, in fact, turn out to hold the key to the renewal of the contemplative tradition during our troubled postmodern times.

Notes 1 We might wonder why? This is not the place for a thorough exploration of the question, but we might imagine that it has to do with Margery’s personality, perhaps with her lack of education, and also with her pursuit of her piety in such a public and unenclosed context. These considerations variously contrast Margery sharply with the lives of figures such as Bridget of Sweden and Marie d’Oignies. 2 It is interesting that Margery Kempe appears not to have visited Durham – even though she travelled to most of the other popular destinations of pilgrims in medieval Europe. 3 We will not attempt to explore this important question here, but the interested reader is referred to Poulain (1950), Mavrodes (1978) and Rahner (1964). The question has also been addressed by many earlier authors, for example, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, but generally the Carmelite perspective has been

126  Christopher C.H. Cook et al. one of caution about placing any weight at all upon such experiences (see, for example, Chapter 11 of the Ascent of Mount Carmel). 4 Margery’s initial vision of Christ, and the words that he speaks to her in this vision, had a similar effect on her. However, unlike Brown’s Durham pilgrim, Margery goes on to experience locutions of a more quotidian kind, and these seem to have a different quality; affirming rather than redirecting. 5 Notably, as proposed by Stace (1973).

Bibliography Burrows, R. (2007) Essence of Prayer, London: Burns & Oates. James, W. (1985) The Varieties of Religious Experience, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lash, N. (1988) Easter in Ordinary, London: SCM. Lash, N. (1996) The Beginning and the End of Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Mavrodes, G. (1978) ‘Real v. Deceptive Mystical Experiences’. In Katz, S.T. (ed.) Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis, London: Sheldon. 235–258. Poulain, A. (1950) The Graces of Interior Prayer: A Treatise on Mystical Theology, ­London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rahner, K. (1964) Visions and Prophecies, New York: Herder & Herder. Stace, W.T. (1973) Mysticism and Philosophy, London: MacMillan.

Index

action: prophetic 90; social 119 Aquinas, Thomas 4, 26, 115 Augustine of Hippo 4, 7, 26, 27, 60, 115 Cloud of Unknowing,The 36, 37, 38, 44 compassion 18, 19, 34, 83, 89, 90, 91, 114, 121 contemplation 15, 17, 31, 32, 37, 39, 40, 43, 44, 46, 49–51, 65, 90, 96, 98, 99, 103, 106, 114–116 conversion see: experiences, conversion Dark Night, The 24, 37 darkness 11, 12, 116, 117; divine 29–31; experiences of 114; of ignorance 37; of sin 38; of understanding 113 dualism 101, 111 Eckhart, Meister 3, 4, 22–23, 26–29 Eucharist 26, 39, 40, 49, 65, 69, 74, 77, 114 Evagrius of Pontus 17, 90, 115 experience: affective 37, 44, 50, 53, 121–123; conversion 38, 42, 44, 45, 63, 86, 90, 100; ecstatic 30, 31, 42, 121; locutionary 4, 126; see also: voices; mystical 3, 4, 9, 14, 22, 24, 27, 28, 31, 35, 39, 48, 60, 63, 65, 72, 73, 75, 76, 87, 109, 111, 113, 116, 123, 124; numinous 57, 76; of Christ 1, 29, 41; of darkness see: darkness, experiences of; of God 37, 61, 62, 111, 118, 119, 124; of the Divine 6, 27, 28, 109, 110, 111, 114, 118; pilgrimage 6, 58–79, 118, 122; presence 1, 13, 29, 48, 62, 64–66, 89; religious 13–14, 24, 48, 124; revelatory 44, 46, 52; sensory 44, 49; sexual 45, 46; spiritual 5, 37, 38, 41, 42, 45, 51, 53, 70, 89, 98, 123; subjective 14, 99, 100;

visionary 4, 34, 37, 38, 40–42, 44, 49, 113; see also: visions; of voices 4, 34, 37, 41, 44, 48–52, 63, 123, 125 fasting 40, 45, 91, 117, 119 Francisco de Osuna 112–113 gift(s): of tears 39, 46, 52; prophetic 41; spiritual 46, 112 hallucinations 44, 48, 51 Hilton, Walter 36, 38, 39, 44–45 illumination 38, 52, 84, 112, 114 imagination 10, 39, 43, 44, 45, 71 John of the Cross 6, 12, 24, 37, 97, 107, 112, 115, 125 Julian of Norwich 38, 39, 43, 54 Jung, Carl Gustav 10, 114–115 light(s) 7, 11–12, 44, 50, 66, 69, 71–73, 113, 116 locutions see: experiences, locutionary; voices Lossky, Vladimir 3–4, 22–33, 110–111, 121, 124 love 2, 12, 18, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 38, 39, 42, 44, 45, 50–52, 62, 65, 68, 69, 88, 100, 111, 112, 119, 120, 121–122 madness 36, 43 Margery Kempe 4–5, 34–57, 109, 113, 117, 122, 123, 125 meditation 37, 38–39, 44, 49, 51, 114; Buddhist 101 memory 3, 9, 10, 43, 50, 58, 68, 73, 76, 79, 97, 103

128 Index Merton, Thomas 6, 83–85, 92, 95, 98–107, 111, 113, 119, 122, 124, 125 mindfulness 119 miracles 15, 41, 49, 67 monasticism, new 5, 80–92, 117, 123 mysticism 1, 3, 6, 9, 14–17, 22–26, 29, 32, 36, 37, 39, 53, 90, 111, 124 pantheism 3, 17 panentheism 3, 16–18 pilgrimage 5, 6, 17, 34, 35, 40, 41, 46, 58–79, 109, 114, 118, 119, 122; see also: experience, pilgrimage practice(s): prophetic 91, 117; spiritual 81, 90, 91, 109–120; see also: fasting; pilgrimage; prayer; retreat(s); sacrament(s); silence; spiritual direction prayer 6, 7, 14, 16, 24, 25, 31, 37, 38, 45, 51, 54, 58–78, 83, 86, 88, 102–107, 109–120, 122, 124–125; affective 54; contemplative 91, 109, 117, 119; daily 90–91, 109, 117, 119, 124; mystical 125 prophecy 90 prophets 90 purgation 2, 38, 40, 45–48, 112 retreat(s) 25, 87, 119 revelation 3, 5, 9, 29–31, 35, 43–45, 53, 111, 114, 121 revelations 34, 39, 41–42, 44, 51, 54 Rolle, Richard 35, 38, 39, 44, 45, 52 sacrament(s) 15, 17, 22, 23–26, 28–29, 31, 40, 49, 54, 111, 119, 124 silence 12, 31, 48, 50, 63, 65, 81, 83, 91, 115–117 spiritual direction 6, 109, 116–117 spirituality 2, 5, 19, 62, 74, 75, 80, 84, 109; apophatic 116; Benedictine 86; Carmelite 24, 115, 125–126; desert 81; eco- 87; English 122; female 54; Franciscan 38, 88; Ignatian 87, 119; inter- 87; monastic 85, 86–87, 89; quotidian 5, 83, 87–91 suffering 18–19, 41, 47, 69, 84, 91, 114, 121–125

tears 39, 41–42, 45–48, 50, 67, 122–123; see also: weeping Teresa of Avila 2, 97, 107, 112, 115, 123, 125 Teresa of Calcutta 82, 123 theology 53; apophatic 26, 29–30, 32; mystical 1–4, 6–7, 16, 22, 27–32, 34, 37–39, 78, 90, 95–99, 105, 109–119, 121–125; Orthodox 3, 22; natural 27; negative 16, 29; pastoral 6; scholastic 100; speculative 2, 27; systematic 6 tradition(s) 24, 30, 39, 46, 48, 54, 79, 85–88, 100, 115, 123, 124; Benedictine 61, 86; Celtic 84; Christian 15, 29, 110, 112, 119, 124; conciliar 25; contemplative 5, 39, 80, 88, 99, 125; desert 80ff, 110; Dionysian 37; eastern (Orthodox) 4, 27, 111, 115, 120; evangelical 54, 85; female 34–35, 40, 43, 54; hagiographical 41; historical-traditional-institutional element of religion 3, 9–11; Ignatian 87; living 77, 118; medieval 2, 53; meditative 39; monastic 103, 117; mystical 3, 23, 43, 95, 98, 110, 112, 113, 115 Underhill, Evelyn 1, 3, 19, 23–24, 36, 38 union: mystical 24; with God 24, 26, 28, 29–30, 32, 38, 112 visions 14, 17–18, 24, 34, 41–46, 48–51, 53, 103, 111, 123, 125, 126; see also: experiences, visionary voices: inner 4, 34, 37, 113; extraordinary 114; mystical 14; prophetic 42; spiritual 53; see also: experience of voices; locutions von Hügel, Baron Friedrich 1, 3, 5, 9–19, 23, 24, 36, 116, 121, 123, 125 weeping 42, 44, 46, 47, 52, 70, 122; see also: tears well-being 60, 110–113, 114, 115, 119–120 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 6, 95–108, 111, 113