Desire is central to John of the Cross’ treatment of the mystical ascent to God. He holds that God is desire and that there is a meeting between human and divine desire in the state of union with God, which is the goal. But it is less clear how this desire is to be understood against John’s programmatic negation of desire on the spiritual journey in both its sensory and spiritual forms,...
Human experience is central to mystical theology but it cannot define it, because, according to mystical theology, the experience is not merely human but divine. After an orientation in the current debate on mystical experience, the puzzling quality of the experience, as both fully human and more than anything human, is elaborated through an exposition of three historical examples, Augustine,...
Pp. xii, 324 , Oxford , Oxford University Press , 2005 , £55.00. This study of mystical experience examines what are called ‘extrovertive mystical experiences’. These are ‘mystical’ experiences in the sense that they display certain features commonly associated with mysticism, especially the sense of unity, knowledge and contact with reality, and ‘extrovertive’ in that they are experiences of...